


As She Flies

by Lynzee005, Van_McNugget



Category: The Beatles (Band)
Genre: Alternate History, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon Compliant, Drama, Eventual Relationships, Eventual Sex, Friendship/Love, Hamburg Era, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Literary References & Allusions, Love Triangles, Multi, Period Typical Attitudes, Romance, early beatles
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-04
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2019-08-17 16:56:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 52
Words: 176,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16520363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lynzee005/pseuds/Lynzee005, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Van_McNugget/pseuds/Van_McNugget
Summary: Over the years, John and Paul had shared jokes and stories. They'd shared meals. They'd shared song lyrics and melodies, strummed on guitars or picked out from the keys of the pianos in whatever room they'd happened to find themselves that night. They'd shared stages, and microphones, and studio recording spaces. They'd shared ideas, and they'd shared heartache; they'd shared triumphs and they'd shared loss.From the basements of Liverpool to the rooftops of London, without realising it, they'd been sharing her all along as well...A NOVEL IN THREE PARTS:Part 1 (Chapters 1 - 20)Part 2 (Chapters 21 - 44)Part 3 (Chapters 45 - )





	1. Live From New York, it's Saturday Night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Van_McNugget](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Van_McNugget/gifts).



> This is a story that has lived within me for nearly 20 years, since I co-wrote the first incarnation of it--way back in the days when ff.net allowed RPF, when the Beatles fandom online was just opening up to me, when I was just 17, and rewriting it, expanding it, and filling in the story with new colours and details, has been the work of the last decade of my life. 
> 
> Therefore, five and six, on behalf of me... I hope I passed the audition. (Thanks sis)
> 
> (Dedicated to Cream Tangerine, without whom this story would not exist -- with love from DW)

 

* * *

 Chapter Soundtrack: ["If It Hadn't Been For Love"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6m8eXdGWGw)

* * *

Prologue  
24 April 1976  
New York City

John Lennon and Paul McCartney doffed their bowler hats as they passed the night security guard stationed outside the Dakota’s Gothic gate, holding their sides and wiping tears of laughter from their faces as they made their way towards the car John had called from upstairs. Linking arms, in jest as well as for support as they ambled along the sidewalk, they hobbled in the general direction of the street.

“After you,” Paul said as they reached the car.

“Ladies first.”

Paul feigned hurt and swatted John’s hat off his head. “You bastard!”

John looked down his nose at Paul. “Since the day I was born, son,” he said, grinning finally as he stooped to retrieve the hat and nearly fell headlong into the parked car idling on West 72nd street.

Paul leaned into the driver’s window. “Do you know where they film Saturday Night?” he asked.

He felt John tap his shoulder and heard him clear his throat, and with a grin still plastered on his face he spun to face his friend. John was looking off at the two men coming towards them.

“Photographers,” Paul groaned as they approached. “Sorry, no autographs.”

John tittered; the security guard stepped just outside his post, readying himself to run interference if necessary, but John waved him off.

“Sorry to disturb,” the first gentleman said, a note of England on his tongue. “I’m Detective Constable Gerald Murphy, and this is Detective Constable Andy Wilson. We’re with the Metropolitan Police Service Criminal Investigation Division.” 

Both men produced identification badges, and Paul did his best to scrutinize them in the dim halo of streetlight he was afforded. John didn’t seem to care; he stared down his nose at them.

“Oh, you’re lost? Took a wrong turn at Ellis Island, I bet. Happens to the best of ‘em.” John snarked, clearly believing he was being funny.

Neither of the men looked impressed. Paul cleared his throat. “What can we do for you?” he asked.

DC Wilson nodded. “You are James Paul McCartney and John Winston Lennon?”

John lost his smile. “Depends on who’s askin.’”

DC Murphy was about to launch into his spiel again when Paul intervened. “Yes, I’m him. We’re them.”

John glanced at his watch.

“Are you going somewhere?” Murphy asked.

“We _were_ ,” John said, his mood soured considerably.

“We don’t want to keep you—” 

“Well, we’d like to know what this is about,” Paul said.

Wilson and Murphy exchanged looks; Wilson produced a notebook from his pocket, scouring its pages for something. Paul could see faint scribblings on each page as they were flipped. Finally, he stopped. “Do you know a woman by the name of Julia Margaret Fitzpatrick?”

Within the space of a heartbeat, both men felt their stomachs cave. John’s eyes widened; Paul hooked his thumb through an empty belt loop on his trousers to steady the nervous thrum of his fingertips.

“Why?” Paul asked.

Wilson scribbled something in his notebook but said nothing. Murphy avoided eye contact as he shifted his heavy bag on his shoulder.

“So you do know her?” Wilson continued.

Paul felt his hackles rising. “Look, you’re a bit far outside of your jurisdictional boundaries, wouldn’t you say?” he asked, looking around for a New York police contingency, someone local who Paul figured ought to be there in order to facilitate the lines of questioning of a foreign police detective on U.S. soil. They were, to his annoyance, the only people on the street. 

“We just want to ask you a few questions,” Wilson said. “When was the last time you saw her?”

“Who’s to say you are who you say you are?” Paul continued. “I think we ought to ring our lawyers.”

He turned to John for support. The look in his friend’s eye was chilling.

“John, let’s go back up and call—”

“I’ll bet she’s dead, Paul,” John said, turning to the pair of detectives. “I’m right, aren’t I?”

Paul’s heart skipped a beat. “John, don’t—”

“I’m right,” John repeated.

Wilson blinked slowly. “She’s a missing person.”

John coughed. “Fuck me.”

Murphy continued. “She’s led an… interesting life, wouldn’t you say?”

“So?” Paul countered. “What does that have to do with anything?” He paused for a moment, watching the men shift their weight from foot to foot. “Can I see your identification again?”

The men were nonplussed. “A friend reported her missing a few weeks ago. That’s when we discovered her open file, and bits and pieces of a life story that has only raised more questions than it’s answered.”

“She doesn’t seem to have a lot of close friends or acquaintances—we’ve interviewed many already. Mr. Adam Levy, Mr. Neil Aspinall, Mr. Pete Best—” Wilson glanced up at John. “Your ex-wife.”

“You talked to Cyn?” John asked.

Murphy took over. “But in all the stories we heard, your names kept coming up. You’re the most credible lead we have.”

“We haven't seen her in years,” Paul said. “I don’t know what we can offer.”

“Besides,” John scoffed. “If Julia disappears, you’re not going to find her. Not unless she wants to be found.”

“That sounds like experience talking,” Wilson said, trying again. “Just a few questions, Mr. Lennon. You may be able to help us find her.”

Murphy gestured toward Paul. “If you have anything to add…”

Paul sighed. “Like I said, I haven’t seen her since…”

He looked at John, and John looked at him, and the instant realization that they were picturing the same moment in time left them both cold—a cold hardwood floor, the smell of liquor in the air, an empty bottle of pills under winter pale skin…

John seemed resigned. “Just a few questions?”

“On my honour,” Wilson said.

Paul acquiesced. He waved off the driver as the quartet walked toward the building.

As they ascended in the same lift John and Paul had tumbled out of only minutes earlier, John leaned against the wall behind him and let out a low whistle.

“Julia Fitzpatrick,” John shook his head.

“What about her?” Murphy asked.

Paul watched as John crossed his arms over his chest and propped a hand up to scratch at his lower eyelid. He was far from amused, but he smirked nonetheless. “I just thought after all these years that I was done thinkin’ about her.”

“What would make you think that?” Murphy pressed.

John shrugged. Paul looked at his shoes. “Ancient history,” he whispered.

Beside him, John scoffed. “ _L’histoire ancienne_.”

They lapsed into silence, leaving the two detectives puzzled. “I don’t understand,” Wilson said as the elevator reached the level of John’s apartment, coming to a hushed but shuddering stop.

The doors opened and John led them into the space beyond. “You want something to drink?” he asked. “Coffee? Tea? I could probably call up for some beer. I don’t think we’ve got any on hand—”

Wilson cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, Mr. Lennon—”

“John,” he said, pointing to his friend. “And that’s Paul. And you’re Adam and that’s Gerald, cops with special badges from across the ocean here in my house to pry into the personal history of someone I cared about very deeply once upon a time.” His voice was barbed. “Let’s just cut the bullshit, okay?”

Silence.

“We’re not doing this out of courtesy or to be polite. I couldn’t give a toss about you two, your work, the fact that you travelled half way around the world to do it,” John said. “But Julia… if Julia’s in trouble…”

The two detectives stood there, dumbstruck. Paul was almost impressed.

“So do you want a drink or not?”

“With respect,” Murphy chimed in, “I don’t know how long we’ll need to be here. We don’t have a lot of questions.”

John nodded at Paul. “If only it were that simple,” he said, his eyes never leaving the face of his one-time writing partner and former bandmate.

Murphy scribbled in his notebook. “What do you mean by that?”

Paul cleared his throat. “It’s a long story,” he said, nodding at John. “I’ll take that, drink, now…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Major thank-yous to Vee, Aidan, and Alexis for helping me proof-read this over the years. 
> 
> Books/websites used for research:  
> \- The Beatles Diary by Barry Miles  
> \- The Beatles Bible (https://www.beatlesbible.com)


	2. I've Just Seen a Face

* * *

 Chapter Soundtrack: ["Jungle Walk"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AG3zaVIdV_U)

* * *

_CYNTHIA: She was just a lovely girl that I befriended at the Junior Art School, when she was just starting and I was finishing up. Everyone else was messing around, it seemed, but she had all this talent—innate, but really untutored, no understanding of technique and no work ethic, and she was kind of moody and sensitive, so you couldn’t give her feedback without her giving up. Her stuff was good though, and she stood out. She would sit in on classes with us older students and soak everything up like she couldn’t get enough, and then she’d produce work that blew us all away. It was inspiring and terrifying—the first time I remember feeling old, like the next generation was already nipping at my heels. Befriending her began as a self-preservation technique, oddly enough. And then she started coming with me to listen to the boys play, before John and I were even together, really… in fact, she was there when they brought home their first record, the one they cut in Percy Phillips’ back room…_

* * *

_PETE: I don’t remember first meeting her, but I do remember being aware of her from very early on in my brief tenure with the band. Hers was a spectral presence; she didn’t have to be in the room for you to feel her. If she and Paul had had a fight, you’d feel it, that kind of thing. But they’d be coming in with songs and you’d just hear what they’d written and know that those words were inspired by someone remarkable but someone they had to speak in code about. I never fancied her, not seriously, because she scared me. I don’t know how she did it, but anyone who could so capture those two…_

* * *

_NEIL: I thought she was attractive but in a very different way than most of the girls in Liverpool were attractive. You got the sense that her appearance was an afterthought, at least at first. Like she didn’t care how she looked, really. But somehow that made her more alluring in a way, that she didn’t care, that none of it was a put-on for your benefit the way it was with other girls. She was smart and witty, had a good sense of humour. You’d feel pretty chuffed if you made her laugh. I think Paul found her challenging, as if winning her was something he had to prove he could do. And then John… well, he never set out to conquer her—he would have been miserable but accepting of the fact if she’d never looked at him and he had to pine for her from afar. I think he admired the way she stood up for herself. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure John was the one who first noticed her…_

* * *

Part 1

\- Tape #1: Paul McCartney -

\- 24 April 1976 -

_(Tape squeaks, hiss; a chair rumbles in the background)_

PAUL: So what do you want to know about her?

MURPHY: How did you meet?

PAUL: Initially? ( _voice cracks; clears throat_ ) This would have been around summer 1958 or so. I’m sure she was one of the first people to ever hear our record, that first one, the demo. ( _Pause_ ) Julia Fitzpatrick… she seemed young, far younger than the other girls she went ‘round with. Very quiet. Pale skin—even for England she was pale. She had a green bike in those days, I remember, too big for her but she was intrepid about it, like it didn’t phase her that she could barely reach the pedals and kept falling over on it. She was very clumsy, not just on that bike, always with bruises… ( _Long pause_ ) Jules was just there, you know? I never paid her much attention. In my mind, she just blended into the walls. It was John who took notice of her.

MURPHY: How do you mean “took notice”?

PAUL: Well he just honed in on her, you know. Because she was different—her look was different. Most of the girls we went out with back then kept their hair smooth and long, bleached blonde if they could do it, wearing long skirts and saddle shoes or, you know, winklepickers, that kind of thing. Julia had this short, pixie haircut. All frizzy and very dark, her hair. I never once saw her wear a skirt, not back then when we first met. She dressed kind of like a boy, and always in black or grey or blue. A bit beatnik, you know. ( _Pause_ ) She seemed to like the music, _our_ music—well I mean I don’t think she would have come around that often if she didn’t—but she never got excited about it and she certainly never chased any of the boys around. ( _Pause_ ) I do remember that John was quite convinced she was a lesbian. She was fourteen, fifteen maybe, so too young for any of us, but I learned much later that he'd made a pass at her and she rejected him. So he took to drawing these really crude cartoons of her, you know, in various—err— _compromising_ positions, with large-breasted and very hirsute women. ( _Pause_ ) He used to call her “Miss Fitz” when she was around, a short form of his sort of tagline for her: “Miss Fitz in all your Nooks and Grannies.” Crass, but typical John. I always imagined that if he couldn’t have her then there must be something wrong with _her._ “She rejected me, so she must not like boys.” He has this incredible capacity for cruelty, you know, that he can turn on whenever he wants to. If you knew him, you knew to shrug it off because it never lasted. Newer people to our circle of friends just didn’t know what to do when he said the things he said. When she just stopped coming ‘round after six months or so, maybe less, I thought she was one of them, that maybe she got wind of what he was saying or saw one of the cartoons and was put off by it. And good riddance, I thought. No one really wanted to be around someone with no humour…

MURPHY: ( _Pause_ ) That’s it?

PAUL: ( _Chuckle_ ) I wish it were that simple. ( _Pause_ ) No, she came back, all right. The first time we played The Cavern as The Beatles…

* * *

9 February 1961  
20 Forthlin Road  
Liverpool

Staring at each other, eye-to-eye across the front room of the McCartney family home, with a notebook between them and their guitars in their laps, John and Paul had worked themselves into a fever for little payoff. The “Lennon-McCartney Original” that lingered, unfinished, beneath fingers forming chords on the necks of their guitars, was likely to stay that way; fresh off the high of their first successful performance at The Cavern—a lunchtime stint but still to a fairly thick crowd—neither of them had wanted to return to reality. So it was that they wound their way through town along familiar streets out to Allerton for a stolen few hours of solid songwriting before Father Jim returned home, when John would take his leave hopefully before being seen by the disapproving patriarch.

Not that Paul cared much what his dad thought. Here was the only guy who had ever made him laugh so hard he thought he’d break a rib, and he was passionate and talented to boot. Paul, a gifted natural musician himself, had never met anyone like John Lennon—proud, gruff, but generous when he wanted to be, he had insinuated himself into Paul’s life like no other, supplanting even the best of Paul’s friends within months of their first meeting a few years earlier. They learned new songs together, aped their idols—Elvis’s swagger, Little Richard’s caterwauling, the intricate vocal harmonies of the Everly Brothers and The Crickets—and eventually took to original compositions, simple songs scrawled in school ledgers. 

Paul often wondered if they’d ever make anything of what they’d written, if he’d ever have the chance to perform these songs in the recording studio he’d imagined countless times since first setting his sights on becoming a musician. Sometimes, he thought it highly likely that the pages beneath his fingers would end up auctioned to the highest bidder, a piece of college-lined musical history; he was careful not to dog-ear the paper too much just in case.

The book he and John had in front of him now, however, had barely been touched save for the sketches and caricatures dashed from the business end of John’s pencil. As the late winter sun began to set and pitched her dusky shades across the sky over Liverpool, and the hour of his father’s return approached, Paul grew antsy. His distraction had led to not one single good idea leaping to the page, and though The Cavern show was most of the reason why, he knew there was something else on his mind, taking him away from the task at hand.

“‘Ey, Macca,” John drawled, using the eraser on the pencil to scratch an itch just under the arm of his glasses, beside his temple. “What’s up with you?”

Paul furrowed his brow and strummed a few chords. “Nothin’ just—” he took a sharp breath. “Did you see that girl, sittin’ just beside the stage? On the right?”

The blank look he got from John didn’t deter him.

“You know,” he persisted, holding his hand out next to his shoulder. “Hair about to here, grey blouse. Legs for _miles_ …”

“Paul,” John shook his head. “When was the last time I saw _anything_ from up on stage?”

Paul realized his error and began to chuckle. “Right, mate. Jesus. Sorry.”

John whipped off his glasses—the ones he needed, desperately, but which he never wore, lest they interfere with his “image”—and shoved them into the breast pocket of his coat, suddenly in a sulk.

“Aw, come on, John,” Paul said, “I didn’t mean anythin’ by it.”

“Yeah,” John said. He closed the notebook and stood up, grabbing his guitar and slinging it over his shoulder by the strap so it hung across his back.

“Can we finish the song at least?” Paul asked, sheepish.

“I’m not feelin’ it,” John replied.

Paul shrugged and shoved his hands into his pockets, trying to hide his disappointment as John made his way through the living room.

“I guess I’ll see yeh around,” John said.

Paul sulked. “Yeah, all right.”

John nodded and Paul walked him to the door, which John stepped through without another word. Paul stood there for a second, replaying the conversation, wondering just how he should have reacted, and what he was going to do to avoid pissing off his bandmate and writing partner next time. He was about to close the inside door when John stuck his head back in; startled, Paul cried out in surprise.

“Jesus Christ!”

“No, John Lennon,” he flashed Paul a toothy grin.

“Did you forget something?”

“This bird?” John asked. “Good lookin’?”

Paul cracked a smile. “I’d say.”

“Blonde or brunette?”

“Brunette.”

John winced. “Big tits?”

“Probably a good handful.”

“Your hands or mine?” 

Paul glanced down at his hands. “Wha’s that supposed to mean?”

John lowered his voice and glanced at Paul’s hands. “They’re very beautiful,” he smirked.

“Eah, fuck off.”

“Watch it, son.”

Paul grinned. “You goin’?”

“Yeah. Gonna try to get in a five mile run with Cyn before supper,” he winked.

Paul rolled his eyes. “Right.”

John saluted. “As you were,” he drawled.

And just like that, he was gone. Paul returned to the front room and cleaned up the evidence—plates and glasses and crumbs on the rugs—before replacing his guitar in his room and lying down for a kip. 

As he watched the walls of his room darken and the colours fade into the early night, he thought about the girl at The Cavern—wearing a skirt too short for the weather, with the camera in her lap, who’d disappeared at the end of their set before he had a chance to even think about chatting her up—wondering where, exactly, he’d seen her before…

* * *

PAUL: ‘Course, pretty soon she was a regular fixture, always just off to the right of the stage, leaning underneath one of the arches, almost out of view, camera in hand at every show. She’d arrive just before we got onstage, and she’d leave almost as soon as we walked off. She wasn’t terribly attractive, you know, but pretty enough to stick out so I wondered why no one else seemed to notice her. A month or more went by, and I kept seeing her—or thinking I’d seen her—but when no one else mentioned it I began to wonder if I was imagining things. Maybe I’d dreamed her up, you know?

MURPHY: Who was the first to recognize her?

PAUL: Well I was. But it wasn’t until right before we left for Hamburg that year that I finally cornered her. Quite literally, if I remember it correctly…

* * *

26 March 1961  
Casbah Coffee Club  
8 Hayman’s Green, West Derby

Of the hundred people crowded in the cramped basement of Mona Best’s Victorian mansion, there was only one person Paul wanted to talk to.

Standing off on her own, beside the canteen, she sipped a Coke and looked as out-of-place in the cellar as sunlight. Every other night he’d seen her since their first performance at the Cavern almost two months earlier, she had disappeared immediately after the final chord in their final song died down. Tonight, for whatever reason, she was still there: beautiful and alluring and mysterious, this girl with no name.

Paul was bound and determined to figure her out.

He pushed his way past the teenagers who’d dug up their shilling apiece to attend the show, brushing off their pleas for a minute of his time with as diplomatic a smile as he could muster. Singleminded, a man possessed, he made his way across the room, eyes fixed, his guitar still hanging around his shoulders.

“Hi,” he said when he was finally close enough to talk to her.

“Oh!” She startled; the straw she’d been sipping through flicked out from between her teeth, a thin line of saliva connecting it still to her lower lip. “Hi.”

“I’ve seen you before,” Paul raised his voice, yelling over the din in the room.

She nodded, but said nothing. Even in the dim light of the club, he could see she was blushing.

“You come to all of our shows,” he remarked, “But you always disappear as soon as we’re done.”

“I know,” she nodded still.

Frustrated, Paul sighed. “Is that all you’re going to say?”

She shrugged and took a sip of her Coke, and the look in her eyes told Paul he was, perhaps, barking up the wrong tree. Shy and introverted, the young woman he had thought was such a siren had turned out to be a dud. He felt himself losing interest by the second. Stuck in a conversation he suddenly wanted no part of, Paul shoved his hands in his trouser pockets and pretended to scan the crowd.

“Is that what you marched across the room to ask me?”

“What?” Paul asked. He’d heard her clearly, each and every word; he was just surprised that she was speaking to him.

The girl screwed up her face, grinning as she chewed on her lip before pulling her straw between her teeth again and taking a sip, her cheeks hollowing as she did. The action—innocent though it was—made Paul’s mind swim. He was forced to rearrange himself as best he could with his hands deep in his pockets, desperate to hide his growing excitement. He struggled to look anywhere but at her mouth. _Maybe there is more to this girl…_ he thought.

“How old are yeh?”

Her Cheshire cat grin-around-the-straw had been one thing; the lidded eyes, shying away before dragging themselves up to meet his was quite another. Paul’s breath caught in his throat.

“Now that’s more like it,” she asked when she’d finished drinking. “Seventeen.”

There was something familiar about her, he recognized, but he couldn’t be sure. He swallowed hard. “Do I know you? Have we met before?”

Cynthia Powell sidled up to Paul and slipped her arm into his. “I should hope so!” she cried. “Julia Fitzpatrick was one of your first fans.”

Paul’s eyes snapped back to her face. For a moment, the similarities eluded him. But as he squinted, just for a moment, he began to fudge with the girl’s features in his mind’s eye—mussing up her hair, imagining it cut above the ears and frizzy instead of reaching down to her shoulders; mentally extending the length of her skirt and the height of her collar until she was covered in black from chin to toe—and the fog began to lift. He took a step back, cocked his head to the side with a grin as the recognition dawned on him.

“Julia Fitzpatrick,” Paul said through his smile.

“Can’t be,” John slurred as he stepped up beside his girlfriend. “ _This_ one’s too pretty to be a dyke.”

Cynthia swatted John’s arm, and Paul felt his face prickle with embarrassment, instantly feeling for the girl in front of him. If she was blushing before, she was gutted then. Lowering her eyes, she crossed her legs at the ankle in front of her and pretended to not be affected.

“Sod off, John,” Paul said.

“What?” he asked. He was drunk, clearly, and without his glasses he squinted even harder at the woman standing against the wall. “Look, even if she wasn’t a big fat lezzy, this girl and Miss Fitz—”

“John, let’s go home,” Cynthia said. She smiled at Julia, who sent a sad smile back. John slung his arms around Cyn and the two of them made their way out to the narrow hallway that led to the door out of the club.

Paul turned back to Julia. “I really didn’t recognize you,” he said. “It’s been a very long time.”

“I’m not a lesbian,” she said flatly.

“I know,” Paul said. “I’m sorry about that. John can be a bit of a—”

“I know,” she grinned. “I remember.”

Paul shook his head. “God, it’s been years,” he said, though in reality, he couldn’t do much more than place her face in a general time frame that coincided roughly with his start in John’s group. “Where have you been?”  


“Around,” she said.

Again, Paul cocked his head to the side. “You don’t talk much, do you?”

She snapped her eyes up to his face. “I’ll talk more if you want.”

He laughed. “You do whatever you want to do.”

Julia grinned and finished off the last of her Coke; someone nearby announced that they’d nicked a handful of rockets and Roman candles from their chemistry class. Without warning, Julia went from demure and shy to rowdy, boisterous; it was such a change, Paul scarcely had time to keep up. She pulled Paul by the hand and followed the group out to the Best’s backyard. 

As they ducked through the cellar door, Julia cracked her head on the low ceiling outside, where a bay window jutted out over the entryway.

“The Casbah Kiss!” a handful of people cooed nearby as Julia stopped and rubbed her head.

Paul manoeuvred her into the light to examine her. “Are you all right?”

She giggled. “You’d think after comin’ here as often as I have, I’d remember to duck.”

He sifted his fingers through her hair. “Looks okay,” he said. “Yer not bleedin’.” 

“That’s good,” she smiled. He readjusted his guitar, still slung over his back, and Julia pulled him to the centre of the yard; the rockets were being arranged in a semi-circle towards the back of the property.

Paul watched with intense amusement and curiosity as Julia jumped and clapped, getting in on the action by poking the long stick ends of the rockets into the grass. She giggled, squealing with delight as the first rocket flared and shot up high into the early spring air, and then the second and third. The fourth—the one she held in her hand, waiting impatiently for her turn to fire—seemed to be a lemon, the fuse not seeming to catch. But they, along with everyone in the yard, startled as the thing finally fritzed, shooting off sideways and landing with a tremendous crash against the side of a backyard shed belonging to a neighbour next door. Everyone whooped and hollered, and when the owner leaned out his window to curse and shout, threatening to call the police, Julia laughed and tossed her head, taking Paul by the hand once again.

“Let’s get out of here!” she said as she, along with everyone else in the vicinity, made a mad dash for the street. It was sight if ever there was one: dozens of people spilling into the street and dispersing left and right towards the relative safety of Mill Lane and Eaton Road. Julia pulled Paul by the hand, and Paul desperately held onto the neck of his guitar so it wouldn’t snap off the strap and shatter against the pavement; eventually the crowd had thinned until they were the only ones in the road, and Paul slowed his breakneck pace, tugging Julia’s hand until her footfalls matched his, echoing off the stone and brick of the West Derby houses and businesses lining either side of the street.

They didn’t stop until they’d reached a bus stop. Out of breath, Paul couldn’t help but laugh.

“What was all that?”

She sighed, heaving deep breaths from the core of her, and leaned against a fence. “You didn’t seem to think I could be a fun girl.”

“I didn’t say that!”

“No,” she shrugged. “But I can tell that’s what you were thinkin'.”

“So yer a mind reader then?”

She swayed, clasping her hands behind her back. “Tell me I was wrong…” she beguiled.

He gulped. “You’re trouble, I can see that now.”

“And you’re the cute one,” she grinned, still chewing on her lower lip. “I bet the girls really like you.”

Once again, Paul felt his body respond. “What girls?” he teased. “I only see one right now.”

Pocketed in a patch of brazen darkness just outside the streetlight’s reach, and without warning, Julia’s hands were on him almost as soon as the words left his lips. 

“So whaddya want then?” she purred, fingers fumbling with the belt buckle on his trousers.

Stupefied, Paul was lost for words; it was all he could to hold onto the neck of his guitar, and only when he failed at that—it slid from his hand and into a bramble at the edge of the walkway behind him, momentarily ensconced in the thorns and safe from harm—did his more rational mind take over. Julia had succeeded in thumbing down his trousers an inch or so, and was now wrist deep against his lower stomach; he reached for her arm, stopping her wild machinations.

“Julia—” he groaned.

She looked at him. “You don’t…?”

He repositioned himself, belt on hips. “I do!” he said, finding his words as he looked around them, at the residences lining the street, hearing the occasional whirr of a motor from adjacent roadways. “Right here? You wanna get caught?”

She looked so crestfallen, and Paul smiled to soften what she must have thought was rejection. So he did what instinct had taught him to do: he leaned in for a kiss, something to solidify whatever agreement they’d suddenly reached on the edge of suburbia, on a darkened street, waiting for a bus.

Julia pulled away sharply. “No, I shouldn’t,” she said.

“Why not?” he asked. _You had yer hand down my trousers not ten seconds ago but now you won’t let me kiss you?_

“Wouldn’t want you to get caught,” she drawled.

Frustrated and confused, Paul huffed. “This is crazy. Where do you live? Can we go there? It’s just here, on the street… and it’s cold…”

From down the road, the sound of a bus approaching cut through the stillness. Julia reached into her pocket and produced the fare as it rumbled into view. “When are you playing next?” she asked.

Paul, his mind wandering to more immediately carnal concerns, stammered his response. “W-we’re not… not for a while anyway. We leave for Hamburg tomorrow.”

With a non-committal shrug, she waved down the driver and as the bus slowed to a stop, she walked to meet it. Paul felt as though his feet were cemented to the sidewalk, unable to move as he watched her walk away. But when she was half way up the steps of the bus, she suddenly motioned to the driver to wait. 

“I ain’t got all night, lady,” the driver murmured as she stepped back off and reached into her pockets for a pen, she found a kohl eyeliner stick instead. She tore the lid off the stick and held the cap between her teeth as she grabbed Paul’s hand and scribbled an address across his skin.

“Write to me,” she said, capping the eyeliner again.

“I will.”

She smiled, nodded, and stepped back onto the bus. “Good night, Paul McCartney.”

“Goodnight, Julia Fitzpatrick.” 

He watched her climb up the stairs to the second level, and kept his eye on her until he couldn’t make out her shape silhouetted in the window any longer, when the bus turned down the winding road and disappeared from view.

_What in the hell was that all about?_ Paul wondered as he stared at the smudgy black writing on his hand. But his attention was pulled away by the sound of footsteps on the pavement. Turning again, hoping to see Julia, his eyes fixed on the petite blonde coming up the sidewalk towards him.

“Where’d you run off to?” Dorothy asked. She slowed, coming to stand a few feet in front of him, out of breath.

Paul couldn’t help but feel deflated, embarrassment and arousal still flushing his cheeks. “Sorry Dot,” he said, thinking on his feet. “Some girl, tried to nick my… guitar.” He reached over and grabbed it from the bush where it had fallen.

His girlfriend stared at the guitar in his hands; Paul was careful to keep the dark black smudge on the back of his hand from being noticed.

“Oh,” she said finally, a cautious smile on her lips. “The lengths some people will go, I guess.”

He shoved his hand deep into his pocket and smiled at her. “I guess,” he replied.

* * *

PAUL: ( _Chuckle_ ) I smudged that address so badly that I never could read it, and so I never sent her a letter, just one or two postscripts tucked into the bottom of John’s letters to Cyn, which I always hoped she’d pass along for me. ( _Pause_ ) I’d never met a girl like Julia before. She was… _fascinating._ Hot and then cold. Just all over the place. It was exciting. I felt like being with her might be the start of a great adventure. But with going off to Hamburg, there wasn’t time to figure any of it out. I packed my bag and set sail, so to speak, and was soon lost in the haze of the Reeperbahn, you know—sex, drugs, rock and roll. I won’t say I forgot about her, but she wasn’t foremost on my mind… not until I came back…


	3. Drive By

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: ["Twenty Flight Rock"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDQsAvmPuT8)/["The Walk Home"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdbRRqUSeOo)

* * *

  _CYNTHIA: I was always secretly quite protective of Julia, from the moment I first brought her around to meet the lads. I wanted us to be friends, and in spite of it all I think we **were** friends. It was just hard not to want to help her. She had this way of making you feel as though she needed you, and it was intoxicating, being needed. The irony of it was that Julia was more courageous and capable than anyone else I’d ever met—she never really needed anyone. And there was nothing any of us could do to help her out of the situation she was in anyway. We just didn’t know it at the time. But did we ever try to help […] Paul was hit hard. I knew he had a girlfriend and I liked her well enough, but I was pleased with the idea of Julia and me being Paul's and John’s girls, so I encouraged their relationship behind Dot’s back. Shameful, I know, all things considered. But if you only knew the joy that Paul inspired in her…  _even if it was only for his optimism, his sunshine _—Paul has always been pure sunshine, at least that's how I've known him _—___ I think, for the first time in her life, she actually needed someone, and it was him... _

* * *

PAUL: Hamburg was… man, Hamburg was something else. Even back then, it had an air of importance, you know. The first trip there had been rather disappointing, at least the way it had ended—deportation, arrest warrants, you know, that whole story—but coming back, and at the Top Ten Club no less, which was a real step up for us… it felt bigger than before. And to have managed all that in the span of a handful of months, well…

MURPHY: So you were there for the spring and early summer of 1961.

PAUL: Yeah, that sounds about right. I remember being let down, mildly, when we returned. It had been so exciting to be in Germany, playing these raucous shows for five, six hours at a time. Coming back to Liverpool was nice, sure, but it was also like… like coming home after a vacation. Everything looks different even though it’s exactly as you left it. The clubs were the same, the fans were the same, but after what we’d been through—hundreds of hours together, on stage and off—it felt too _little_. Like Liverpool couldn’t hold us anymore. ( _Pause_ ) Of course maybe that’s just me. I always thought we were on our way to something greater. I think John knew it too. Especially after Stu officially left the group, and he had by this point. So coming back to Liverpool put me in a very different mindset. Just looking toward the horizon, imagining what was next.

MURPHY: What was next for the band or what was next for…

PAUL: ( _Pause_ ) You know, I had Dot, and I had lots of other girls besides, good Liverpool girls who’d have bent over backwards to be with one of us. So I can’t decide if I was crazy or stupid or both to want the one girl who ran so hot and cold that half the time I didn’t know if I was coming or going with her. ( _Pause_ ) It didn’t help much that John had started in on me, as well. So then I had two reasons to want Julia—for myself, and to prove him wrong.

* * *

25 July 1961

Late night...

“So yer new girlfriend stood you up, eh?” John teased.

Paul shrugged. He and John tumbled up the stairs and out onto Mathew Street, the sudden change in temperature from the sweating cellar behind them and the brisk air outside making them gasp and shiver as they gained the cobbles at street level.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Paul replied against the chill. “And maybe something came up.”

John feigned sympathy, “Yeah, I’ll bet she decided to make it a night in with her ladyfriend.” He snickered. “I told you, son. You didn’t want to believe me, but I could tell… the look in her eye—”

Paul shook his head. “What is it with you?” he asked, hunching his shoulders against the early autumn breeze and shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his trousers. “Ever since I started talkin’ to Julia again, you’ve been a right tosser about it.”

It was John’s turn to shrug.

Paul stared at his feet as he walked. “I’ll bet you made a pass at her and she turned yeh down, didn’t she?”

John’s stony silence was more than answer enough. Paul laughed out loud. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw John glaring at him.

“Oh, shove it up yer arse, McCartney.”

“Jesus, John. Not every woman able to resist the considerable charm of Master Lennon is a lesbian, you know.”

They trudged along Mathew Street, kicking at stones in silence for a long while. Finally, John grinned. “I wonder if she’d be up for a _menage a trois_ , though, know what I mean?”

Paul fought the urge to laugh. “I’m almost glad she didn’t show up. Christ, you’re embarrassing!”

“What’s with _you_?” John nudged him. “Don’t tell me you’ve actually got a _thing_ for this bird. You barely know her. You didn’t even recognize ‘er when you first saw ‘er!”

It wasn’t an unfounded observation. For a moment, Paul was lost in thought. “I don’t know,” he finally replied. “If you’d seen her… ah, but then of course, without yer glasses…” 

John sneered at the joke about his eyesight and his terrible sensitivity about the whole thing. “That’s a low blow,” he muttered.

Paul chuckled. “Well you remember what she looked like before. I’m tellin’ you, you wouldn’t recognize her now, either.” His drunk half-remembrances of the way she’d looked all those years before were probably quite a bit more exaggerated than he realized. But in his mind, the girl he’d known before, with her mop of mousy coffee-brown hair, cropped short about her ears and left to frizz, the grey woolen school jumpers and knee-high socks and scuffed penny loafers, was as far away from the Julia Fitzpatrick he knew as air was from water. He shrugged. “She’s not the girl you remember, John. She’s—”

“A Venus de Milo!” John interrupted, stopping on the sidewalk and spreading his arms wide, hollering to the nearly empty street: “A goddess! A sexual scratching post for the young Beatle Paul McCharmley!”

Paul quickened his pace, determined to put as much space between himself and John as possible. “Eah, sod off.”

John laughed and fell in step with Paul again. “You’re too uptight, son,” he said, clapping an arm around the bassist’s shoulder and nodding off towards their pub of choice a few doors down. “Why don’t you buy me a drink?”

But Paul shrugged him off. “‘Ey, John, I’m knackered. I think I’d better call it a night?”  


“In Hamburg we’d just be gettin’ started!”

“I know, I know…,” he smoothed out the top of his hair, “I’m gettin’ soft, is all.”  


“Don’t let the ladies ‘ear yeh,” John said, raising his voice again so everyone in the vicinity could hear him. “We don’t want the fine, upstanding young women of Liddypool to think ye’ve lost yer virility, too!”

A couple of girls down the street giggled and glanced their way, and Paul grinned, embarrassed but not interested in picking a fight. He nodded at John. “See you?”

“Yeah,” John said as he wandered back down the street towards The Grapes, where the rest of the band was probably already tucking into their post-show pints. Paul trudged to the bus stop.

The quiet of that trip—sitting solo on the top deck, staring out the windows at the council homes and the city lights as he passed by—always permitted him the space to think. That night, he thought about the band, the way the last year had been going and how he was sure that things were heading in the right direction, finally, after all their hard work; he thought about the show that night, how he’d messed up and played in the wrong key and how John had nearly cuffed him during the break between songs. He thought about how badly he wanted to see Julia after not seeing her for what felt like an age but which was, in fact, about a week and a half.

_You’ve lost it,_ he told himself, knowing it to be true. He barely knew her when he knew her, and he’d managed to get on without even thinking about her for the better part of two years. Now, she shows up again, and after a handful of months with barely more than a handshake between them, he was an amorous mess. Small wonder John was so incredulous.

_But back then she was a girl...now—_

Before Paul knew it, he found himself standing a few paces from his front stoop, looking up at the dimly lit windows of the home he shared with his father and brother. In his mind’s eye, he could picture his room, his bed, his drawers, clothes laid out on the comforter. Taken a step further, he knew he could probably imagine much more without a lot of effort—Julia sitting next to him, the delicate and pale lines of her collarbone exposed in a cowl neck sweater or an alluring skintight number with a low neckline, the scent of her perfume mingling with perspiration standing up against her skin, the two of them grasping each other in the dark… 

He shook his head and cleared his mind of the images, borne out of his own teenaged frustration with being unable to physically consummate the fledgling relationship, no further along than it had been that night at the bus stop in the spring, and he felt embarrassed not only because he’d been dreaming about Julia for the entire trip home but that he had ended up here, at the front gate, with a firm and noticeable erection pressing against the buttons of his trouser fly. He felt his cheeks flush and was instantly grateful that the dim light of the street lamps couldn’t reach him where he stood.

Not that anyone would be there to see him. It was late; his dad and brother, Mike, would be sleeping, and even if they hadn’t been, it wouldn’t have been out of character for him to feign surliness and bound up the stairs to his room with nary a word spoken. Mike might have picked up on his brother's foul mood, but Dad—Lord love him—would have quietly assumed the problem was with that Lennon boy, and he would have saved the misplaced lecture for the morning, when Paul would have been better prepared to deal with it, _sans_ erection of course. No matter which way he sliced it, he was in the clear. So with a sigh Paul ambled up the walkway and slipped his key into the lock. 

The sound of footsteps running up the sidewalk behind him gave him pause; he turned around and saw a blurred figure phantoming down the street from the east and, for a very brief moment, his heart skipped a beat. The Gothic ghost stories from his youth flooded back into his memory, about heartbroken ship’s captain’s wives and unfortunate young prostitutes, pregnant and alone, throwing themselves in front of trolleys or into the Mersey. He wondered if perhaps he’d interrupted this particular spirit’s midnight haunt, or if she had unfinished business, but then what did she want with him? He stood still, hoping and praying that she would pass him by.

But the moment was fleeting, and Paul quickly recognized who it was without even having to think too hard about it. However, as Julia approached—with her hair flying out behind her and her coat whipping open—Paul had to admit that she did look ghoulish; like a banshee, her unholy vestments disappearing into the ether as she barrelled towards him. Paul shivered, as if someone had opened the icebox. He struggled to conjure a smile as she approached.

“Paul!” she panted, out of breath, pushing through the gate. Her hair settled across her shoulders, a wind-blown halo framing her face as she stood backlit by the streetlamp. Translucent skin glowed in the pale light, save for the flush of exertion staining the apples of her cheeks; she was out of breath but smiled broadly, her grin cutting a swath of gleaming teeth across her face.

Amused, Paul stood with his arms crossed. “Yer late.”

“I was coming by to see you when you got off the bus. I called you all the way from the bus stop!” she gulped down air as if she couldn’t get enough of it. “You need yer ‘earing checked.”

“Sorry,” he smiled. “What happened tonight?”

She shrugged. “Family obligations.”

Her rapid, shallow breathing filled most of the space between them; for a long while it was all he could hear.

Finally Paul gestured to the door. “I’d offer to let you come in, but…”

“No,” Julia replied. “Just wanted to say sorry, about missing the show tonight…”

“Well let me walk you home,” Paul said before remembering that she lived way in the south, in Speke. He shrugged. “Or, at least, let me walk you to the bus stop.”

“Really, Paul, it’s okay,” she smirked. “I’m not fourteen years old anymore. I know how to get home now.”

He smirked. “You run all the way here to tell me you’re sorry and that’s it?” He chuckled and stepped down from the doorway to join her on the walk. “No, I insist. I may not be a real gentleman or anythin’, but… .”

Julia smiled. “Why would you want to do that?”

Paul didn’t know what to say. He shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked on his heels. He answered her question with one of his own. “Why _did_ you come all the way up here?”

She shrugged her shoulders, and he could tell from the look on her face that she was lost for words. But as soon as defeat shadowed her face, it was gone, replaced with the cheekiness he’d expected. “To be honest, McCartney, I guess I just wanted to see yeh.”

“Well, then,” Paul nodded, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

She blushed.

He continued to nod absently, rocking on his heels, trying to come up with something to say. “Well, the least I can do in that case is make it worth your while.”

For a brief second, frightened surprise flashed in her eyes. Paul laughed.

“I mean a walk, Jules,” he said with a shake of his head. “In the general direction of wherever it is you want to go.”

She relented, first with her eyebrows and the tops of her cheeks and then with the spreading smile of her lips, and finally she nodded. “All right.”

“Come ‘ead!” he said as he started off down the street.

For a while they walked in silence. Julia kept her arms crossed, sometimes struggling to keep up with the taller, longer-legged companion beside her, and he was constantly reminded to slow his pace, turning to look at her but never saying anything when he did. Paul had always been an easy conversationalist; now, here, he didn’t know what to say. What did he know about her? He’d built her up in his mind to be something more than he could possibly have known; she was larger than life, large enough for John to point it out to him. He felt sheepish and immature, hit with the realization that his rather short-lived schoolboy-like infatuation with her had led to this moment, and his tied tongue was blowing it.

Paul shoved his hands into his pockets. “Where _do_ you live?” he asked.

“You have my address.” 

He was too afraid to admit that it had smudged off his hands on that first bus ride home, but was saved from having to say anything as she swung her arms down at her sides. “But that’s not what you really want to ask me, is it?”

“Isn’t it?” 

She shrugged and turned the corner onto Mather. The road was dead quiet without a car in sight up either end of the street. She stepped into the gutter, splashing into a puddle; the toes of her shoes glistened with rainwater. “You want to know if I’ll take you home with me.”

Paul was going to crack a joke to ease the embarrassment he suddenly felt at her accusation—because, if he was being honest, of course he’d try and get past her front door if he thought it possible—but something about the way she said the word ‘home’ struck a chord with him. He shivered. “I wouldn’t…” he started, but the words escaped him.

Julia had begun to meander out into the road and trod the lane markers like a tightrope. “You’ll watch for cars, yeah?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said, turning for the first time to do so because it hadn’t occurred to him to check at all.

She held out her arms and mimed a tightrope walk routine. “Ta,” she said. “Can’t very well go and get myself run over now, can I?”

“No, I reckon not,” Paul grinned, shoving his hands into his pockets as a headlight beam flashed in the corner of his eye. “Car,” he dutifully warned her.

Julia glanced behind her as the headlights brightened, shining on her fully. She hopped off the line and side-stepped to the curb, taking up a slower pace until the car went by them both. She eyed the car; Paul watched her smile faintly at the occupants as they passed. Finally, with just the faint illumination of the taillights to see by as they receded down Mather, she skipped off the curb and trod her way to the centre line once again, arms stretched out as she walked. “I imagine getting hit by a car wouldn’t be the worst way to go, though,” she remarked. “At least it’d be over quick.”

Paul scratched his head. “S’pose so,” he said.

“Although…” she shrugged, contemplative. “Imagine if you got hit by a car and didn’t die right away. If you just had broken bones, or you were in a coma for ten years, or worse…” she shuddered. “What if you were a vegetable or something?”

It was a dark conversation. Paul shook his head. “That's awful,” he said.

“You don’t think about death?” she asked.

“Yeah, I guess,” he replied. “Just not like that.”

“We all have to die,” she shrugged, hearing a second car’s rattling engine approaching from behind. She stepped over to the curb again to wait for it to pass, wincing from the sound of a loose fan belt, the _clunk-clunk-clunk_ of the engine block, as it whirred past them. When it did, she continued her walk down the centre line, but her pace had slowed considerably. The car could be heard for three or four blocks, loud enough to make conversation impossible; it was several long seconds before anything more was said.

“John’s mum was hit by a car, wasn’t she?”

Paul muttered a soft “ _Mm-hmm_ ” and shivered against the chill of the night. “Her name was Julia too.”

Julia didn’t reply right away but when she did, her voice was as slow, its cadence matching her footsteps. “Did she die right away?”

Paul remembered the day as if it were yesterday. “Yeah,” he intoned. “Pretty near, anyway.”

A long silence again stretched between them, surrounding them on the darkened street. Paul could hear the sounds of his own footsteps echoing off the houses and inside his head, the scuff of his sole as it struck the pavement against a gritty layer of sand and pebbles. He listened for Julia’s footfalls but heard only the breeze in the turning-brittle leaves above his head, the rustle of the fabric in her coat cinched tightly around her waist, or the cough that seemed to emanate painfully from her sternum as she forced it from her body. He didn’t know what else to say. 

For the third time, Paul realized a car was coming up the street from behind them. He motioned to Julia. “Car,” he said simply.

Julia had her eyes focused on the line, was still stepping one foot in front of the other like a star performer on the Ringling Brothers high wire. She was smiling.

Paul laughed. “Come on, Jules.”

She giggled and stopped, turning around to face the oncoming vehicle, still a hundred yards away. She didn’t move, just stared down the headlamps that illuminated her in the darkness; she was grinning, ear-to-ear, as she kept her arms outstretched and tilted her head skywards, closing her eyes as she began to laugh.

The car honked its horn but she didn’t move. Horrified, Paul stepped off the curb, crying her name and reaching out to grab her by the wrist. He yanked her off balance, out from the middle of the street toward the curb, where she tripped and tumbled, scuffing her knee against the pavement. The car swerved to the right to avoid them, its driver shouting curses Paul could hear through the closed window as he continued to drive on. 

Paul hauled Julia to her feet, and she brushed bits of gravel away from her badly-skinned knee.

“Christ, Julia…” Paul intoned.

She sniffled and shrugged, standing up to her full height, and brushed her hands together, loosing embedded pebbles from her palms. Her smile was still there but, with the tiny tears in her eyes, she didn’t quite look the same as she had before. A trickle of blood was running down her leg, but seemed to have stopped mid-shin. She shrugged, again. “Sorry Paul,” she said. “I won’t do it again.”

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She nodded. “I’ll be fine.”

“Your knee though. It looks pretty bad.”

“Haven’t you ever fallen off your bike or tripped on your own feet, Mr. McCartney?” she teased. “I’ll be okay.”

She turned and started to walk again; case closed. But Paul took up on the outside, nearest the road, just in case. 

They didn’t say anything for a long while; Paul tried to rationalize what he’d witnessed, wondering if maybe she didn’t hear the car or his urging for her to get off the road. He didn’t want to think about what might have happened, his stomach flip-flopping every time he chanced to linger and project; he couldn’t help seeing the car hitting her body, her body flying in the air or dragged beneath the wheels.

He had been telling her the truth, that he never much cared for ruminating on the morbid side of life, but if she could have asked him then, he would have said that his mind was stuck wondering what it would have looked like had she been hit by the vehicle, what sound he would have heard as the chrome bumper struck her body or when her body struck the pavement, how much blood there would have been… 

They continued on in virtual silence, shaken but adjusting, allowing the adrenaline to wear off. Eventually their aimless wandering led them back up Mather again, and he was glad for it; they were on the other side of the road, passing the nicer semi-detached properties that Paul had always admired, being such a far cry from the brick-and-mortar council house he called home. The sight of these homes gave him something else to ruminate over—the warm light from inside each window, the neatly-trimmed hedges, window boxes filled with fragrant late flowers—instead of his wild imaginings.

“I used to live here,” Julia said, her voice breaking through the whisper of a night enveloping them. 

“Here?” Paul asked. “On this street?”

She stretched out her hand and pointed at a house down the way. Nestled between a beautifully kept home with pansies beneath its windows and one with big windows sheathed in rich red curtains, the startlingly dark house Julia pointed to seemed so incongruous. It was the only one in either direction without its light on; flaking paint and crooked wooden siding and missing shingles on the roof made it look like it had been empty for years.

“That one?” Paul asked, wrinkling his nose as they neared its front walk.

She shrugged, glancing up at the house; standing in the light from the street lamp, shadows pooling in the hollows of her cheek and creating lines in her face that Paul was sure weren’t there before, she looked as dark and sad as the house; worn, and in need of care. “That was the last place my family all lived in together.”

Paul looked up at the house and then back at her. “What do you mean, the last place? Where’s your family now?”

Julia opened her mouth to speak. but the rumble of a bus coming in the southbound lane of the dual carriageway stole her attention.

“This is where I say good night,” she grinned as she broke away from him.

Stunned, Paul followed. “It is?”

She turned and walked backwards, facing him as she talked. “What kind of a girl do you think I am?”

He smiled back at her. “Yer gonna ride the bus all the way into Speke all by yourself?” he asked.

Julia seemed dwarfed by the darkness of the street behind her until the headlamps of the bus drew nearer and illuminated her better. She was still smiling, but the mirth was missing; she made a face and shrugged. “I’m tougher than you think, Paul.”

_What am I supposed to say to that?_ he wondered. He still thought putting her on a bus home alone was a bad idea. As the bus slowed near the stop, he became desperate to hold onto her. “So that’s it? This is our thing now? We say goodbye at bus stops?”

Julia laughed. “I guess so!”

“Hardly satisfactory,” Paul grumped.

The bus inched forward, and Julia stood, waiting, for a slight second before stepping back towards him. She stopped inches from his face, their bodies touching from shoulders to knees. He tried not to let his shock show as she placed her hands on his shoulders and lifted herself up on tiptoe until they were eye-to-eye. Heat from her body and the scent of her perfume mingled beneath his nose; her eyes locked to his, and he didn’t want to blink. With a crooked half-smile, she leaned into him and pressed her pursed lips to the corner of his mouth. Paul slipped his hand around her waist, as painfully aware of every layer of clothing between them as he was of the lushness of her lips, chaste and timid, juxtaposed so deliciously with the way she seemed to grind her pelvis into his the closer he pulled her in. When she broke away, she wore the same smile; Paul could have melted into the sidewalk.

“Satisfactory?” she cooed.

Paul nodded, his voice having escaped him.

Julia touched a finger to her lips and backed away, toward the bus. “Good night,” she said as she stepped up, waving a little before handing her fare to the driver. 

Paul knew that was his cue to leave, but he couldn’t get his legs to work. As the bus pulled away from the curb and he lost sight of Julia through the grimy windows, he gulped down lungfuls of air and steadied his heartbeat. His eyes were still on the bus when took his first step into the road, almost directly into the path of an oncoming vehicle.

“Bloody teenagers!” the driver shouted as Paul leapt back into the gutter, soaking his shoes in a puddle. The car drove off, and Paul, even more startled but at least back in the present, cautiously made his way home. He heard the soles of his shoes echoing off the pavement and the distant sound of a train in the Allerton rail yards. Hands in his pockets, he ran across the boulevard and toward the council yard, down the street, and up to the door of his family home. 

With all the stealth of a rampaging elephant, he made his way upstairs and woke the whole house; Mike grumbled and Father Jim was stern, but Paul didn’t care. He heard their voices but wasn’t listening as he laid back on his bed and stared up at the ceiling, lost in a dream of Julia Fitzpatrick’s creation.


	4. I Got the Feelin' I'm a-Fallin'

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack:  ["Fallin'"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7RUjXf9wR0)

* * *

 5 August 1961  
20 Forthlin Road

Sitting cross-legged on the floor, George tapped out a rhythm on the edge of his guitar. Paul and John sat in the arm chairs, lazily writing lyrics and trading melody and harmony as if lobbing tennis balls across the room. The television set in the corner was on but no one was watching. It was, by all accounts, a typical Saturday afternoon at the McCartney residence. They waited for Pete, the last to show up, so they could leave for their evening performance at The Cavern; until then, lazing about was the order of the day.

“Son, why don’t you turn the telly off if yer not gonna watch it,” Paul’s father called from the kitchen, breaking their reverie slightly, the first disturbance—if it could be called that—of the afternoon.

“Right Dad,” Paul muttered, concentrating on the chords he was playing. John scribbled something in the notebook on his lap.

“Maybe you should turn it off,” John mumbled.

“It’s actually kinda nice having something else to listen to besides you and yer banjo chords,” George remarked, pointing a slender finger at John.

Paul laughed as John narrowed his eyes at George over the top of his thick black glasses. “I don’t play fuckin’ banjo chords…” he muttered, bending down again and scribbling into his notebook.

“Not anymore, you mean,” George ribbed.

Paul laughed and his dad called his name again, a reminder about the television, and Paul fluidly leaned over to get up.

“Yeah, yeah, all right,” he muttered, a smile still on his face, as he flipped off the set. The room was pitched into semi-darkness, the only light being the late afternoon sun that filtered through the drapery panels on the front window; Paul turned on the light in the corner. “The days are starting to get short…” he said. “I hate this time of year.”

“Darkness falls,” George lowered his voice in volume and up in pitch, adopting the standard, nasally, BBC documentary announcer’s Received Pronunciation as he spoke. “An autumnal gloom descends upon Merseyside.”

He played a few notes from what sounded like a funeral dirge on his guitar, and John jokingly saluted the setting sun out the McCartney’s window. The three of them collapsed into a fit of nerve-y giggles.

Paul picked up his guitar. As soon as his hand gripped the neck and began to form the chord he wanted, the doorbell rang. Shrill, piercing, it was the loudest sound to interrupt the solitude of the day; everyone alerted to the door but no one made any move to answer it.

“Aren’t you going to get it?” George asked.

Paul glanced at the door, then back at his mate. “I just sat down…” he complained.

“Christ yer lazy,” John eyed him up and down before reaching out and grabbing Paul’s right bicep in his hand. “No wonder ye’ve got such scrawny arms!”

Paul wrenched his arm out of John’s grasp and stood up, but his father was already marching toward the door. A blast of cool air swept through the den; muted voices could be heard in the entrance hall.

“Paul, it’s for you,” Mike sing-songed as he bounded across the entryway into the living room, past the boys on his way through the house.

“How do you know?” Paul asked.

“Whenever some pretty bird shows up on the doorstep, it’s always for you,” he replied from the distance, without a hint of sarcasm or irony in his voice as it drifted off within the house.

Paul stood up and saw his father step back inside. Addressing his eldest, Jim McCartney intoned brightly: “A young woman named Julia to see you, son.”

John turned to look at Paul, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively. George craned his neck, curious and eager to finally see what all the fuss was about.

“Hi Paul,” she said softly, and then upon seeing John and George, she startled. “Oh, I’m interrupting.” 

She seemed to make a reach for the door. Paul rather acrobatically climbed right over John and a low ottoman in an effort to get to her before she doubled back and reached it again. “No… no no, you’re not interrupting.”

She stepped back into the light of the den and smiled. He hadn’t seen her since the night she’d walked in front of a line of cars in Mather Avenue; in fact, he hadn’t heard from her since then at all. Seeing her now, bathed in the reflected light from above, was a shock to his system; she wasn’t ghoulish at all; she was soft edges and smooth contours, quietly warm. Such a contradiction…

“Hello,” she said, then looking at John, “I didn’t know you wore glasses.”

John brought his hand up to his eyes and flicked them off in one quick motion. “I didn’t recognize you.”

“Seems to be a common problem amongst you lot,” she joked. She looked past Paul at George, craning his neck to catch a glimpse. “George, is it?”

He stood up. “For the record, I don’t really remember you either,” he deadpanned.

She smiled. “Well I remember you.”

George, clearly chuffed, beamed a toothy grin at her.

Paul motioned toward the kitchen with a slight nod of his head. “Would you like some tea… or… something?” Paul asked.

Julia shrugged, “No, I just… well, I actually came by to give you this,” and she produced from her pocket a small envelope. Handing it Paul, she continued to shrug, “It’s not a big deal or anything but I've just found out that... some of my pieces...”

He took the envelope from her. "You're showing yer art?" he asked as he lifted the flap on the envelope and found a single ticket inside. He was genuinely touched that she'd want to invite him. But it wasn’t until he read the details on the ticket that his eyes opened wide. “It’s at the Walker?”

Julia blushed. “It’s not until next month, you see. I just found out about it. I got a whole mess of tickets for it and no one to give ‘em to,” she chuckled nervously, looking into the room. “I have enough for all of you. I would have brought more if I’d known you’d all be here…”

“But it’s at the Walker Art Gallery?” he asked again.

John was suddenly at Paul's side, tearing the ticket out of his hand. “And your work’ll be there?”

“It’s not a big deal… I mean, it is for _me_ just because I’ve never shown anything in public before, but I guess…” she stammered.

John handed the ticket back to Paul without saying a word. Julia seemed to deflate.

“I can get you a ticket, if you’d like,” she offered. “One for Cynthia, too.”

John shrugged, “Yeh,” he replied noncommittally. “That’d be fine.”

“I’ll take one, if you’ve got one,” George chimed in.

Julia smiled. “All right. I’ll bring them by, then.” She lingered in the doorway for a moment that slowly became awkward the longer it stretched out without a word being spoken. 

“Maybe I should be going,” she said finally.

“You sure?” Paul asked, rushing once again to intercept. 

“Yeah,” she smiled, “I’ve got a… well, I’ve got a date tonight, so…”

At the mention of a date, Paul felt a twinge in his stomach; ridiculous though it was, he actually felt jealous. 

_And what would_ your _girlfriend think?_ Paul’s conscience seemed to ask. _If she knew about the girls in Hamburg and the birds at home and how you’re acting right now… ._

Paul took a breath, “Well then—”

“See you around?” she smiled. She reached a hand out to wave into the living room. “You too, George, John.”

George waved; John suddenly couldn’t be bothered to look up at all, bent low once more over his notebook. Paul frowned, seeing Julia look down at her hands—was she being coy? Trying to be cute? Or was she hurt by John’s ignorance of her? Paul couldn't tell; he shook his head and tried to stop overthinking.

“Bye, Paul.”

“Bye," he replied absently, looking up in time to see her  turn to leave. He opened his mouth to say something— _Stay_ , he wanted to tell her.  _Blow off your date. Come to the show. Marry me—_ but no words came out. 

Suddenly Julia paused, her foot halfway out the door, before spinning to face him again. “I don’t really have a date," she said, her voice low. She shook her head. "I don’t know what made me say that…”

Paul didn’t have to force the smile that came next, such was the power of his relief at her confession. “But why—?”

“Compulsive liar, I guess,” she winked at him, and he thought he saw something of the spark in her eye dim as she did so. She looked away briefly, eyeing the doorframe, before composing herself and meeting his eyes once again.

Paul didn’t know how to reply, but even if he had, he never got the chance; she was half way down the sidewalk by the time he realized the words had been spoken.

Back in the house, with the door closed and a good distance between him and Julia, Paul leaned into John. “Bloody hell!” Paul breathed as he walked back into the room. “You can be so rude, you know that, Lennon? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Paul didn’t hear his father reprimand him for his foul language; his eyes were trained on the back of John’s head. John, for his part, had picked up his guitar again and was absently thumbing the strings over nonsense chords; the television was back on. 

“Did ye hear me, John?” 

John stood up and turned up the volume on the set, “Quiet Paul, I can’t ‘ear.”

But John wasn’t watching; as he sat back down in the armchair opposite the television, _his_ eyes were trained on the front window and the figure of the girl walking away down Forthlin Road.

* * *

PAUL: That was the thing about Julia. I always felt like she was feeding me a line. To this day, there are things she told me that I wonder about—was she telling me the truth? I have no idea. But at the time, I just accepted what she offered, virtually no questions asked.

MURPHY: Why?

PAUL: Because she was so good at playing the game. She knew what I wanted before I knew what I wanted, and then she would become that thing, and it was like a dream come true for a guy like me. But it blinded me to the bigger picture. ( _Pause_ ) I’ll say that for John: he might not have been able to see much in reality but I’ve long suspected he could see through everything she put up. All the smokescreens and elaborate fantasies. ( _Pause_ ) He knew the score long before anyone else did…


	5. Born Leverpullers

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: ["Only in the Dark"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v76rBjOFPCY)

* * *

 

\- Tape #1: John Lennon -

\- 24 April 1976 -

 

( _Tape hiss; three taps to the microphone_ )

JOHN : ‘Ello… yeah, you getting this? ( _clears throat_ ) I guess I first met her in… oh some time in 1958. She was a kid, but a cute kid. You know—not in a girlfriend kind of way; in the kid sister sense. That’s what I remember. She was a lot shorter than the other girls, and over the course of that first bit when she was around, those six months or so, she shot up until she was an inch or two inch shorter than me. ( _Pause_ ) Small tits, I remember that. ( _Laugh_ ) I did try to pull her once. Didn’t go so well for me.

WILSON: Ouch.

JOHN: Well, I wasn’t the good sort, quite scrappy and full of myself, especially back then. Bit of a bastard, if you ask me.

WILSON: How do you mean?

JOHN: Possessive. Jealous. She had the good sense to turn me down then is the way I look at it. But I still liked her. She was…different. It wasn’t really until we went to Hamburg that first time that I realized that Jules was miles ahead of the Liverpool girls. She didn’t bother with people if she didn’t have to, and I suppose it was because of her upbringing—she had these walls she put up, which we did our damnedest to knock down so we could get to her. Of course later on I realized that she had wit and a tongue that could eviscerate you if you ended up at the wrong end of it.She was driven to be more than just some Scouser’s wife. Merseyside’s answer to Astrid Kirchherr, maybe. In fact, she was a fine photographer in her own right, like Astrid, which was maybe what turned me on to her. For all my bluster and bravado, I actually rather like women with their own thing going on. I just didn’t know it at the time.

WILSON: Astrid?

JOHN: Stu’s girlfriend. Well, they were engaged, actually…

WILSON: Stuart Sutcliffe, is that right?

JOHN: Yeah. One of my closest mates, a real gem of a guy. He met Julia once or twice before he died, actually. ( _Pause_ ) Stu had this ability to see to the heart of you, to see who you really are. It was uncanny. And he was always right. He knew the good eggs from the bad. So of course I wanted to know how she stacked up in his mind. ( _Pause_ ) I suppose in that sense I have him to blame for setting me on this path. Him and Paul.

WILSON: How so?

JOHN: When I heard Paul had bumped into her, that he was chatting her up—( _Pause_ ) Yeah, I was jealous. She’d turned me down, and now she was going for Paul. Didn’t do much for my ego, you know. ( _Pause_ ) But then to hear it from Stu… well, I was a goner by that point.

* * *

6 August 1961  
Very early morning…

John leaned back against the angled rooftop and let go of the lungful of cigarette smoke he’d been holding. The steady stream blew out and up into the damp, cool night air; he imagined his lips were yet another chimney atop one more fire burning bright in a Merseyside hearth, lit earlier than usual to ward off the frigid midsummer storms blowing down from Scotland. John’s fire, burning low and slow in his belly, was a different sort of beast, of course; one lit without his consent, dangerously close to consuming him from within, whose kindling had been laid years before but had been lit with the fuse of an afternoon’s idle folly, in an Allerton council house living room. It had roared to life in the span of less than twelve hours; the smoke curling from John’s mouth and nostrils now was the evidence of its path of destruction. If he sat still long enough, he thought he could feel it trailing along each vein in his body…

It was a stupid, romantic notion, but John was full of stupid, romantic notions these days.

Stu sat beside him, leaned against the same stone railing, smoking from the same pack of cigarettes. They were mirror images—black drainies, legs crossed at the ankle, ciggies between right-handed nicotine-stained knuckles, heads arched back to peer past the stars winking through the holes punched into the clouds above their heads—the only difference being that Stu’s hair blew in the breeze, freed from the constraints of the Brylcreem’d Teddy Boy DA which John still sported. Perched as they were—four stories above the city, trespassing on the gabled rooftop of their old Gambier Terrace flat—they could see for miles in almost every direction, except where the still-under-construction Anglican cathedral blotted out the horizon. 

It had been Stu’s idea to shimmy up the drainpipe to the roof, and seeing as how it had been a good night and would be Stu’s last in Liverpool for a while, John saw no reason to deny his friend’s request.

“Good show tonight,” Stu drawled beside him.

John dug the heel of his boot against the eaves and pushed himself up against the shingles. “It was all right,” John replied. “Too much jazz though.”

“I like jazz.”

“‘Course you do,” John grinned. “Fuckin’ exis...”

Stu laughed and John wrapped his grinning lips around the end of his cigarette to take another long drag.

“So yer a permanent Hamburger now?” John asked.

Stu exhaled his own long stream of cigarette smoke. “They’d have to drag me out kickin’ and screamin’.”

John scoffed and waved his hand dramatically in front of him at the grey and dark expanse of city skyline beyond. “What’s Hamburg got that Liverpool doesn’t?” he asked, a joke in his voice.

Stu’s reply couldn’t have been more serious. “Astrid.”

“Ah, well,” John said with a sigh. “Can’t compete with a bird, can we?”

“Not this one,” Stu continued, his voice a dreamy pitch above a whisper. “I’ve asked her to marry me.”

John swallowed. “Yeah?”

“Spring time.”

He took another drag. “Officiated by the Gestapo?” he asked. “Or will it be a nice, dreary English wedding? Tea and crumpets, readin’ the banns…”

Stu shrugged. “I don’t think it matters much. We could get married in a mud puddle and it would be perfect.”

Another scoff, but softer this time. “Marriage…”

“Don’t you want to marry Cyn?”

John shrugged. “‘Course I do,” he said, without hesitation, but as soon as the words left his mouth, John was left wondering why he’d said it, or if he’d truly meant it. He _could_ imagine himself marrying Cynthia Powell; that wasn’t the hard part. She was a good girl, better than him in manners and in class, someone with whom carving out a life together wouldn’t be a struggle. And he loved her. 

But marriage was forever, wasn’t it? Legally binding, yes, but involving the intricate workings of the heart; this wasn’t just a contract. It was messy, emotional. John wasn’t sure he wanted any part of something like that.

“I don’t know, Lennon,” Stu said as he released another curl of smoke. “You know… I feel as if I’ve got one foot on another plane. Do you know what I mean?”

“No.”

Stu laughed, and John was surprised to find that it sounded thin and faraway. He looked over at his friend but said nothing, waiting instead for him to finish his thought. But Stu had drifted away; his eyes were fixed on the heavens above, unwavering. An awkward silence stretched on between them; John was hit with the sensation that he was on the precipice of a different kind of conversation, one he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to head into.

“It’s like… it’s like being inside a dream,” Stu said finally. “Like I fell asleep with a palette and paintbrush in my hand and woke up with a bass guitar, and I’d been drafted into me mate John’s skiffle band, and there I was in Hamburg surrounded by pretty _frauleins_ , playing music until my fingers fell off.”

“Yer welcome for that,” John joked.

Stu continued. “I _should_ thank you,” he said, turning to John. “Because the dream led to Astrid. And I’ve never been happier, John. She’s everything.”

“And now yer gettin’ married,” John said.

“Aye, I am,” Stu said. “I’d actually hoped you’d be a mate and stand up with us. You know…”

John was momentarily taken aback; he’d never imagined having a close male friend, someone for whom this might happen. He didn’t know what to say. So he covered it all with a goofy grin. “Do I get to kiss the bride?”

Stu chuckled. “Ye’d ‘ave to ask her that.”

John laughed. “You really love ‘er don’t you?”

The gaze Stu returned was answer enough without the words that accompany it. “More than anything in the world.”

John felt genuine joy for his friend. But listening to the certainty with which Stu talked about his future with Astrid made John nervous. Aside from his music, he figured he’d never been that sure about anything in his life.

Of course Astrid was something else; if she hadn’t fallen for Stu so dramatically, John was absolutely certain that he would have made more of an effort to pull her himself; more than that, he figured he’d have tried decently enough to earn her love, to deserve _her_. But it wasn’t to be, and now it would _never_ be. Astrid would continue to exist as an avatar of that unearthly and divine perfection, smarter, more beautiful, more interesting than anyone else he’d had the chance to know.

Save perhaps one…

As if on cue, Stu turned to John. “So that girl Paul went off with at the end of the show… that’s Julia, eh?”

John nodded and blew a smoky tendril up into the night sky. “Miss Fitz herself.”

“You know I met her this afternoon?”

“You what?” 

Stu nodded. “Me an’ Astrid. I was showin’ her our old haunts, you know. And Cyn and Julia, they were coming back from the art gallery. Something about a show next month—she’s got five photographs going up,” he said. Then he scoffed. “Christ, seventeen years old and she’s already gonna have her art on the wall at the bloody Walker…”

John lifted his eyebrows. The thought had crossed his mind, as well; he suddenly felt very old, unaccomplished. “What did you talk about?” he asked, desperate to change the subject but dead curious at the same time to discover everything Stu thought about the girl who had so captured his imagination.

Stu shrugged. “Not much, really. She’s not very talkative, Julia, is she?”

“Dunno,” John replied. “I’ve hardly spoken to her.”

“Why does she keep her portfolio at Cyn’s place?” Stu asked.  


“I didn’t know she did,” John said.

“I thought it might have something to do with those bruises on ‘er arms,” Stu continued. “Don’t suppose she’s got much support for this artsy stuff at home, eh?”

John paused. “What bruises?”

Stu puffed on his cigarette. “She ‘ad a few. On her forearm. Some older than others. You know, ugly yellow colours,” he said, pointing to his own arm, in apparent approximation of where the bruises sat on hers. “She wasn’t really dressed for the weather, come to think of it. She really ticks all the boxes.”

John started to grow irate. “What are you fuckin’ on about, Sutcliffe? Tickin’ fuckin’ boxes…”

Stu looked at his friend. “Christ, John, all I’m sayin’ is she seems to be one of those girls, you know… the ones with mean boyfriends or drunks for fathers. _Someone’s_ been manhandlin’ her…”

The idea didn’t sit well with John. Julia would have been far from the first person John had known to suffer abuse at the hands of someone close to her; in fits of jealous rage, John himself had succumbed before to those baser instincts and lashed out, physically. It wasn’t an original story. But something about imagining Julia—this quiet waif of a girl with the faraway eyes—on the receiving end of such violence rankled John to his core. He couldn’t help it; he found himself imagining fists raining vicious blows against her body; he heard raised voices and shouted curses; he saw her crying. And he wanted to disbelieve, to discount what Stu had seen, to explain it away as the result of clumsiness or a bleeding disorder or something— _anything_ —other than what was likeliest. _But what the fuck does he know?_ he asked himself. _He’s talked to her for all of thirty seconds._

But then he stopped himself. 

_That’s the thing, though_ , he thought. _Thirty seconds is more than enough time for Stu Sutcliffe to figure it all out…_

“At any rate, she doesn’t seem to be ‘is type.”

John, shaken but brought back to reality, turned to look at Stu. “Whose type?” 

“Paul’s.”

“If it moves, it’s ‘is type,” John joked. “He’ll shag anyone.”

Stu laughed. “Paul McCasanova,” he said. “But I thought he and Dot were on the up-and-up?”

“Yeah, well.”

“What’s the story there again?” Stu asked. “Between you two?”

“Me an’ Paul? Or me and Dorothy?”

Stu snorted. “Daft,” he said. “You an’ _Julia_. Didn’t you fancy her?” He lowered her voice. “Once upon a midnight dreary?”

“Nevermore,” John quipped, shoving his tongue against the inside of his lower lip and jutting out his jaw. 

“Quoth the raven,” Stu shook his head. “It’s her though, eh? The one you told me about, from years ago?”

John nodded. “Yeah, it’s ‘er.”

Stu stubbed out his cigarette and flicked the butt off the edge of the roof. “You know I love Cyn. I think she’s a peach of a girl.”

“You’ve got yourself a bird,” John said. “Leave mine alone.”

Stu continued. “And I think you’re better together than you think you are,” he said. “But Julia…” he trailed off. 

“What about ‘er?”

“She’s one of a kind, John. I can just feel it,” he said, with that faraway airiness to his voice. “She’s different. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have thought she’d be the one you’d wind up with.” He turned to John. “I don’t care what you say about marriage, John, if it ever happens fer you—and it doesn’t matter who you marry—I’d be honoured to be yer best man, too.”

It was John’s turn to grow quiet. He pushed his glasses up onto the top of his head and scrubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. For a long and lonely moment, he stared out toward the river, the sight of it largely blocked by the construction scaffolds and the heavy brickwork of the cathedral and unfocused by his poor, unaided vision. Doubts flickered in his mind; he thought of the million paths his young life might have taken him down had he turned this way instead of that. For a moment, it was as if those paths stretched themselves out across the city tapestry sitting blurred before him: pale streetlights zig-zagging this way and that, car headlights careening left and right, brightened and windblown smoke trails from all those chimneys swirling around and around. 

And then there was him, John Winston Lennon, immobilized at the centre of it all, bound to the path he was on by indecision and fate and his own stupid, nearsighted judgment. 

He wasn’t even twenty one and yet he suddenly felt the weight of his years, his mistakes, settle upon him. _I’m not old enough to have this many regrets_ , he thought. _At this rate, by the time I turn 40…_

“Do you ever feel old?” John asked.

“Old?” 

“You need yer 'earing checked?” John asked. “Yeah, old. _Too_ old. Ancient.”

He cast a sideways glance at Stu; he was the only person John could have asked this question of, the only person who would know what in the hell he was talking about. If he didn’t know what to say, or if he laughed, or if he simply didn’t reply…

“I feel so old…” Stu trailed off, turning to look at John. “I’m so old I’m half dead.”

John laughed, long and loud, as a matter of reflex. But the look in Stu’s eye told him that there was more to the statement than he was letting on.  

 

* * *

JOHN: That was one of the last times I ever talked to Stu, you know. We wrote letters now and then, but our time together was coming to an end and I wish I’d known it then. I don’t know what I’d have done differently. Told him I cared, I suppose, or that I was sorry for all the stupid shit I’d ever said or done. And if he were here right now, I'd tell him that he was right, you know, about Julia. She was something special, and I spent far too long trying to convince myself otherwise. 

WILSON: Why do you think you did that?

JOHN: Because she was Paul’s girl…


	6. Rules of Engagement

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: ["Take Five"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzpnWuk3RjU)/["Portrait Gallery"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA2cbO5GhzI)

* * *

 18 September 1961

Walker Art Gallery

As a rule, John was not attracted to brunettes. There was something common about them, boring. Something too inherently British. Boys like him didn’t go to the cinema to drool over Audrey Hepburn; they went to see Brigitte Bardot, Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe. Americans. Glamourous. Beach bodies and California tans.

But there were times in John’s youth when the deep-seated desire for a dark artistic goddess sprung up within him and he felt drawn to their side. A part of him always wanted to possess his own Sophia Loren or Rita Moreno. The mystery, the sexuality, the unique “other”-ness that they radiated stood in such stark opposition to the platinum blonde bombshell that he couldn’t help but feel a twinge of arousal, of passion at the thought of getting close to one of them.

Julia Fitzpatrick had very quickly become his Juliette Greco.

John had no idea why he found her so alluring; there was nothing about her that was inherently attractive—greyish eyes seemingly set a little too far apart on a narrow face; a small mouth and almost too-thin lips the same colour as those hideous _cafe au laits_ Stu was so fond drinking, not pink or plump like the other girls; crowded teeth; poker straight eyebrows. The only thing he really liked about her face was her nose, and that only because it fit her face and was dotted with freckles. John had always liked freckles.

Somehow, for whatever reason, these imperfections created a greater whole than the sum of their parts would lead one to believe was possible. She was cute; adorable, even. Not sexy or even really beautiful. She wasn’t perfect; she was _attainable_. Maybe that was why the girl he had dismissed so many years before—from the day he’d first tried for her and had been totally rejected instead—had become the very object of his sudden and intense infatuation.

The truly mad part was that he didn’t even really know her. Three years removed from their first introduction, he reckoned he hadn’t spoken more than a dozen words to her. All he knew was what he’d gleaned from the minutes spent in her presence, and even that was blotched and spotty, a few scant images in a sea of memories: vague remembrances of a Rolleiflex camera, the sound of her shutter clicking, a bus to Speke, the hot cerise blush on her skin, a broken lens. Add to that the current image of a girl in a black blouse and black leggings, standing in Paul’s doorway, and a few casual remarks from Stu on a Liverpool rooftop, and that was the grand sum total of everything he knew about her. 

Yet here he was, on the steps of the Walker Art Gallery, waiting to go in and see her art for the first time. Ticket in hand, John walked up the front steps and pushed his way through the doors. Cynthia had been busy and wasn’t able to join him; Paul had called earlier to say that he'd already been in to see the show and wouldn't be going that night either. 

It was just John.

He was pointed toward the foyer of the gallery where the makeshift exhibit of art from students at the Liverpool College of Art were set up. Big signs announcing the John Moores exhibit were strung up everywhere; this student art show was clearly piggybacking on the third instalment of that biennial art competition. The excitement surrounding it in the rather insular world of the Liverpool arts scene had driven quite a crowd of people to take in the early work of some of the more promising students enrolled or entering the prestigious art school. 

John had never much cared for this sort of scene, but as he walked towards the doors and hear the approving murmur of the assembled guests, he felt a twinge of envy. Stu's work had fetched fifty guineas a year earlier; Julia's artwork was somewhere inside the walls of this stately neoclassical gallery. Nothing of John's had ever been worth more than the cost of the paper it had been drawn on. 

_Some people have all the luck_ , he thought, shoving his hands into his pockets and trying to focus on the task at hand. He scanned the crowd for Julia; in the sea of muted browns and navy blues, John was doubtful the girl in black he was looking for would present herself, and for the briefest of moments he considered leaving. But then he saw her, and she had clearly already seen him. She walked towards him with purpose, a bounce in her step, and smiled at him as she approached.

“John,” she said. “It’s so nice that you could come.”

John simply nodded. "Just me," he said.

She looked pensive for a moment, but shrugged it away, her face still beaming bright and beautifully. “That’s all that matters.”

He had never inspired such happiness in someone, he was certain of it. Something about that put a bounce in _his_ step, too.

“Where to first?” he asked.

John motioned for her to lead, and Julia walked him to the section he’d been heading to, where people stood, gawking at the artwork set up on tall modular walls. They sat at right angles to one another, creating little “rooms” where a group of artworks could be housed. John felt out of place; his thick-heeled stage boots clipped along the polished floor and echoed through the hall, and even in his nicest collared shirt and his only pair of trousers he owned that weren’t under seventeen inches in diameter at the cuff, he knew he was the outcast. As they walked past the other patrons and John began feeling their eyes on him, sizing him up, he commenced mentally making fun of them, stringing together snippets of their conversations and making a utterly nonsensical monologic stream of speech in his mind. He attributed this line to that person, standing with her hands on her hips, or that one with his glasses on his forehead, or that one with his spectacles low on the tip of his nose, each voice low and full of Continental condescension. _Bleedin’ sods…_

Julia suddenly grinned at him. “What’s funny?”

He hadn’t realized he was laughing. He cleared his throat. “It’s absurd, this.” He motioned around him, at the people, and then saw Julia’s expression fall. “Well, I don’t know about your artwork… but the _people_ are… or they _can_ be, at any rate… I mean, it’s not like…” He stuttered and stumbled over his words like a prattling child mired in speech impediments.

“First day with yer new tongue is it?”

He shrugged and exhaled a breath he scarcely knew he was holding in. Julia laughed.

They had stopped in front of the first art piece that didn’t have a large group of people standing around it. John was unimpressed—a painting, done in a heavy-handed stark impasto style and uninteresting colours that were somehow both boring and garish all at once. He grimaced before he realized he was doing it, then cast a glance in her direction, prepared to walk it back if he’d offended her. “This isn’t one of yours, is it?”

“Goodness no,” she said. “I can’t paint to save my life!”

John glanced at her and stifled a chuckle. “Neither can this guy,” he said.

But she was already moving on towards the back wall, so he followed her. They continued past the next few pieces and stopped at an engraving that looked like something Picasso might have done if he’d worked more with lumber instead of paints. John wasn’t so convinced that he liked it or didn’t like it. He glanced at Julia, who stared at the piece as if trying to decipher it for herself. 

“Not mine,” she said, noticing his stare.

“Oh, fess up now,” John put on a voice. “You’re real name is—” he glanced at the title card, “—Robert Loughlin... and you simply love wood, don’t you?”

She laughed, “Well, you caught me.”

“I bloody knew it,” John drawled, pointing at her, drawing attention. “She’s a fraud!”

Several people turned to look at him and sneer; he sneered right back. Julia pressed her hand to her mouth and stifled her own giggles, and John managed a small smile.

They walked slowly around the next few groups of people before stopping in front of a large photograph. Abstract, in black and white, it took John a moment to recognize it as the Lime Street train station—a photograph taken of a set of tracks leading down toward the horizon, the focus settled on the lower foreground, a mix of lens bokeh and deliberate post-production effects to make it dreamlike, but not enough to obscure the fact that it was, unmistakably, a part of Liverpool. 

“This is yours.” 

He wasn’t asking; he was stating. It was obvious. He didn’t need her nod or quiet _“Mm hmm”_ to tell him that.

John thought he saw her blush. “Let’s keep moving,” she said.

But John had turned back to that image, the first of six in a small cluster that were attributed to her. They were fairly typical photographs, the kinds of things he’d seen in portfolios of dozens of his classmates at the Art College. There was one of a lamp post, a slightly blurry Liver bird, ripples in a puddle of water during a rainstorm, the exhaust pipe and registration plate on a Liverpool bus, and the train scene. He had, admittedly, seen better photographs—but something about them was striking. Technically, she was still developing an eye for composition, and if she was trying to make a statement with the underexposure here or the peculiar decision use soft focus on everything, it was lost on John entirely. But the heart of each of the five pieces was there, speaking to him. He didn’t say a word but continued on down the row, surveying each one.

When he reached the last in the series he stopped: a slightly out of focus self-portrait, taken in a mirror, presumably in her bedroom. It was intimate in a way that he wasn’t expecting: the slightly rumpled bed linens and the indentation on the pillow, the sleepy way Julia’s hair seemed mussed, as if she had just woken up, yesterday’s makeup staining her skin and a too-large men’s dress shirt hanging on her small frame. It looked post-coital, and even the title— _Après_ —suggested that to him. He felt like a voyeur. 

He  _enjoyed_ feeling like a voyeur.

But it was the look on Julia’s face that was most intriguing. She was positioned at a three-quarter angle to the image plane with faraway eyes—perhaps out the door, or the window through which the sharp sunlight was streaming from just out of frame. There was a sleepiness to her face which John liked; but the hard edge of her eyelids—seemingly the only part of the photo was was in focus—showed sadness and resignation and fear and cold determination all at once. _Are you acting?_ he asked the girl in the photo. _What are you looking at?_ He didn’t know what to make of it, but more than anything he needed to try to make _something_ of it.

With a deep sigh, John turned to Julia. “I fuckin’ love it.”

“Really?” she asked, breathless and quiet.

He nodded. “I’d love to see more.”

She shook her head. “I don’t really have much more, just whatever the school will let me develop,” she said, combing hair behind her ear. “Photography isn’t a cheap hobby, you know!” Then she smiled at him. “But maybe someday, when you lot make it big, rich and famous-like, you can buy me a dark room.”

“Rich and famous, eh?” John smirked. “What makes you so sure that’ll ‘appen?”

She shrugged. “Some people are destined to lead great lives, John.”

It was a shocking sentiment, coming from someone he barely knew, but somehow it rang truer than most things he’d heard that week from people who knew him far better. It warmed him inside out, to be thought of as such, and he wanted more than anything in the world to believe her, to be able to subscribe to her vision without irony; but more than that, he wanted to deserve the praise of the girl standing at his side, the one whose enigmatic eyes stared past him from out of the final photograph. That realization struck him hard. He slowed his pace and took in each photograph again—and especially the last one—soaking every last bit of it in until he was sure they were burned on his occipital lobe.

“Say something John?”

He startled out of his trance, standing to his full height as he realized how badly he was hunched over in an effort to better see the photos. He straightened his back and tugged at the bottom of his jacket before shrugging. “Wanna take a walk?”

Julia smiled; relief filled her eyes. “Yeah. That’d be nice. I’ve been in here all day.”

As his feet led him out of the museum, he had to concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other just to keep himself from falling over.

With the rain stopped, the night had become rather calm and pleasant. Julia had grabbed her sweater from the coat check as they’d left; this she had hung loosely around her shoulders, but as they walked, she slipped her arms into the sleeves and hugged herself to keep the heat in. But she never complained about the cold. She talked about school and her first semester at the Art College, how all she ever wanted to do was study photography, and how she eventually wanted to get a job traveling the world taking pictures for _National Geographic._

“They want me to paint,” she scowled. “But I’m a picture taker not a picture maker.”

“What’s the difference?”

She shrugged and was silent for a long moment. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I guess _you’re_ a picture maker. Not just because of your drawings, but because of the songs you write and the way you talk. You create pictures with words and your voice and your songs…”

John swallowed. “You’ve seen my drawings?” he asked, suddenly remembering a night that felt very long ago, when a book of images had fallen into her hands, in a community hall in Speke...

"Some of them,” she said, bowing her head. “Very imaginative.” Then she paused for a long while, still trudging ahead along the walkway, before taking a breath to speak again. “Though just for the record, if I were a lezzy, I would probably go for the same girls you do and not fat librarians who don’t shave their legs.”

John laughed out of nervousness. “You would, would yeh?”

She laughed. “What can I say? I think Brigitte Bardot is _une femme par excellence_.”

“She’s a photographic savant, she speaks French,” he threw up his arms. “Is there anything you _can’t_ do, Miss Fitz?”

A moment passed where neither of them spoke. They’d made their way from the city centre to the shoreline. Her shoes clicked on the stone walk, and the sounds were carried out towards the Wirral, or was lost to the sea. John was suddenly saddened to be at the death of it, these sounds that came from the soles of her feet, that she made with such purpose as she walked at his side.

“What’s your favourite book?” she asked.

“Mother Goose,” John quipped.

Julia laughed. “My parents loved to read. Books make me feel… closer to them, I guess? My dad would be the one to read to me. Mum, she was always… lost in the books she read.”

“Where is she?” he asked, adding: “Yer mum, I mean.”

“Dead as a door nail,” she said. 

John felt a twinge that gave him pause. “Sorry,” he said. “Mine too.”

“I remember,” Julia whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said. “You weren’t the one who killed ‘er.”

“I know,” she nodded. 

They walked along in silence for a few steps before he started talking again, to break the silence more than anything. “Her name was Julia as well,” he said.

“Right” Julia replied. “Paul told me.”

_‘Course he did…_

“Mine was called Hannah,” Julia said. “She was sick for a long time. Just very sad… the kind of sadness that comes from inside yer bones, you know? And when I was six, she went away…” She folded her arms across her chest as she trailed off, muttering to herself.

“Away?” John asked. “Where?”

“Hospitals,” Julia said. “Mental hospitals. She wasn’t always away, though,” she continued, a bit louder. “She’d drift in and out of hospital, a week or two here and there, and then she’d be back for a few months before heading back in. She could never work steady jobs, and so we lost the house and moved around a lot, and that was fine until me Dad left—”

“When was that?”

Julia shrugged. “Ten years ago?” It wasn’t declarative; she squinted her eyes and tried to count back, but got lost in her head. She waved her hand in front of her. “That’s when Mum got a boyfriend, and then we moved into his place…” she trailed off, heaving a sigh. “And then Mum was gone for good, you know, and that was that.”

John walked in silence for a moment, waiting for her to continue. “So where does that leave you?”

“Orphaned, really, at least according to the government,” she said. “So Dick—that’s me mum’s boyfriend—he gets a bit of money, charity money from the government and what-have-you, because he’s lookin’ after me, but that stops when I turn eighteen.”

“And when’s that?”

“December.”

John couldn’t help himself. “What’ll you do then?”

Julia laughed. “Well Dick thinks I should marry him.”

It was John’s turn to laugh. “Cor, you’re not serious.”

“God’s honest truth.” 

“Come on,” John urged. “Yer dead mum’s boyfriend ‘as the hots fer yeh?”

She shrugged. “I always had a choice: tell my sick mother that our meal ticket was sneakin’ into me room at night, or I could get good at fighting him off. But I couldn’t do that to Mum, and she’s dead now anyway so…” she smirked, raising a fist as she continued: “I got got at fighting.”

John dragged his toe and scuffed it accidentally against the cobblestones beneath his feet. This was a heavier confession than he’d been prepared to deal with; his mind travelled back to that August night when Stu had told him about the bruises on Julia’s arms. Reflexively, John gritted his teeth. He didn’t know what to say. “Fuckin’ awful,” he said. It felt cheap and inauthentic, entirely unhelpful. But it was all he had. 

Far off, a ship coming into the harbour let out a loud, long blow of its horn, the mournful sound filling the harbour and echoing off the Albert Dock, obscuring the sound of the water lapping at the sea wall. Julia walked a little bit closer to him, their feet striking the cobblestones in time with each other. He could smell her perfume, and it made him want to hold her. 

“I’m still here, for better or worse,” she said finally, reaching into the pocket of her coat and pulled out a crumpled envelope. “My dad’s been in Paris all along. It was always my plan to go see him as soon as I finished school, when I had the money. That’s why I taught myself how to speak French. But—” she tapped the envelope against the palm of her hand. “I guess I waited too long.”

John caught her meaning in an instant. “When?”

“End of August. I think from cancer but I don’t know for sure,” she said. “He was the artistic one. Mum was a dreamer. She had no compass. Dad was different. Passionate.” Julia smiled. “He loved James Joyce—that’s the Irish in him. Fancied himself a great writer.”

“Was he?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “He moved to France probably because it was never his plan to be a father, even though I think he was a pretty good one. I like to imagine him in a flat overlooking the Seine or somethin’, writing novels. ‘Cause if he died a penniless beggar then it hurts to think he left us for that.”

“Yer not mad at ‘im?” John asked. “For leavin’?”

Julia sniffled. “I used to be. But it’s hard to stay mad at someone when he’s all you’ve got left,” she said. “He got married again, I guess. She’s the one who wrote to me, his new wife. He’s left a lot of his things to me, by the sounds o’ things. So I’m off to Paris in a few days. Just for a couple weeks,” she added. “Or maybe longer. You know, liquidate dad’s assets and blow all the proceeds on absinthe and tacky souvenirs.”

“Not a bad idea,” John said. “Maybe you can buy me a birthday drink at the Moulin Rouge.”

She looked at him. “You’re going to Paris?”

“In October,” he nodded. “Paul ‘n me.”

Julia nodded and smiled. “Well then…” was all she said.

Eventually the ebb and flow of the night wore down the hours between dusk and dawn, and Julia began to yawn. “Sorry,” she would mutter intermittently as she shuffled along the cobblestones, until John was prompted to ask her where she lived and how she was planning on getting home.

“You’re not taking the bus by yourself into Speke at this time of night, are yeh?” John asked when she told him her plan, surprising himself with how much he sounded like his Aunt.

She snorted. “You sound exactly like Paul.”

And just like that, John was reminded of the rules. Because there _were_ rules, about who to date and how to date. He’d broken them all it seemed, in one way or another, with the girls he’d seen and been seen with over the years. But there was one rule even John was leery of breaking, and Julia had invoked its name: One could fall for one’s best friend’s girl—you can’t help things like that—but never, under any circumstances, was it okay to pull her.

John swallowed hard. “Let me at least ride the bus with yeh,” he said.

The peal of another foghorn drifted to their ears from far off in the harbour; Julia listened until the echo died off and all they were left with was the sound of the waves lapping at the sea wall. “Okay,” she said.

John nodded, shoving his hands into his pockets, and they turned around and made their way to the bus stop in virtual silence, John listening to the _clunk-clunk-clunk_ of her heels on the stones, the swish of her book bag against her hip, her measured gait slow and steady as she walked at his side. 

They boarded the bus and climbed to the top deck, and John produced a cigarette as soon as he sat down, offering her the same courtesy. With her lit cigarette pressed between her index and middle finger, she took a long drag and blew it toward the open window, perching her elbow on her knee as the cigarette dangled, its tip glowing. Even at this time of night, the bus ride wasn’t a quick one; John settled in, and when Julia finished her ciggie and tossed the spent stub out the window, she settled too, leaning against the seat back, slightly too close to John. Within minutes, the hum of the bus engine and the rocking bounce of the road had lulled her to sleep; her head rested, feather light, against John’s shoulder, and he didn’t dare breathe.

But the bus had entered Speke, and he didn’t know where she got off. Torn between wanting her to stay and needing her to leave, John finally cleared his throat, and Julia sat up.

“I fell asleep?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Sorry,” she blushed, pressing a hand to her cheek and running it through her hair. Her faraway look brightened as she affected a light smile. “I haven’t been sleeping very well lately…”

John watched her fight another yawn. “I didn’t want you to miss your stop.”

“Ta,” she replied, glancing out the window as if it had just occurred to her that she would have to exit the bus at some point. She trained her eyes on the landmarks she could see beyond the glass, and after a long moment, she pulled the cord to signal her stop to the driver. “Just in time,” she smiled at him.

Then she hoisted her bag to her lap and began to dig into its depths, stopping only when she had pulled out a small leather book, which she handed to him. It was heavier than he expected.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“A bit of this and that. Art stuff mostly.”  


He looked down at the book and then over at Julia. “Yours?”

“Yeah,” she smiled. “Tell me what you think when you’re done,” she said, before producing a pencil and snatching it back. She whipped it open to a page that looked to be full of half-finished sketches. In the top corner of one of the pages she scribbled a few lines, circled the worlds, and folded the corner down.

“Where I’m staying in Paris,” she said, as she placed it back in his hands. “Montmartre. Don’t be a stranger.”

This was a girl who hadn’t spoken more than two words to him since he’d known her, from their humblest beginning in the yard between the Inny and the Art College to now; the girl he had once thought fancied Cyn over everyone else, because why else was she hanging around them so much and not throwing herself at one of the boys? Now, she was sharing her work and writing her Paris address in between sketches on a page. John was at a loss for how to reconcile the two Julias in his mind. 

_Forget what you think you know, Lennon,_ his mind told him. _Start fresh._

He put the book under his arm. “I won’t,” he said.

The air caught between them felt charged, and John felt a strange intimacy growing between himself and the girl he had vowed to ignore all those years ago.

Julia didn’t get ready to leave the bus until the last possible second, dragging out their parting for as long as possible. He watched as she descended the stairs and craned his neck to see her exit the bus and walk down the street away from him, in the opposite direction that the bus was traveling. He hoped she got home safe, wherever that was; he wished he’d gotten off with her instead of riding the bus to the end of its route and back again to get home.

Later that night, as he pushed his way in through the back door of the respectable semi-detached he was still sometimes sharing with Aunt Mimi—to a warm house, with tea in a cozy on the kitchen counter and fresh baking under a towel next to it, left out for him whenever he’d happen to make it home—he wondered if Julia would know the same comforts, if she'd ever known them. Something inside told him she wouldn’t, and possibly _hadn’t_ , since long before the death of her mother. That realization saddened him far more than he felt it ought to have. He wondered then if he should have invited her here instead, snuck her in somehow, given her his bed…

She’d gotten so far under his skin he could feel her in his blood, and the more he tried to force her out the stronger the pull became. It was undeniable now, impossible to ignore. He had fallen-- _hard_ \--for Julia Fitzpatrick.

*

WILSON: Did you believe what she told you? About her life?

JOHN: I wanted to. She never gave me any reason to not believe her, if that’s what you’re asking. But it was ghastly to think about—lots of things went on behind closed doors that were never spoken of, and here she was spilling everything to a virtual stranger? I didn’t know what to make of that. So I guess I wondered if it was a put-on, though for whose benefit I never could work out. ( _Pause_ ) And then, of course, there was Paris.

WILSON: What happened in Paris?  
  
JOHN: ( _Pause; the sound of a chair creaking_ ) You ever hear about those people who climb the Eiffel Tower or go to see the Mona List or whatever and they have these fits when they get there? Crying and going on like they're dying?

WILSON: No, I can't say that I have.

JOHN: I think I read about it somewhere, I don't know. For a long time I guess I kind of thought that's what had happened to her when we were there, because it was Paris and Paul was there doting on her and with everything that had happened with her dad... I wanted to believe, maybe, that it was this transitory thing, that it would pass and she'd be fine once we got back home. But it wasn't. Looking back, it was just the beginning.


	7. Je vois le vie en rose

* * *

Chapter soundtrack: ["La Vie en Rose"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqDxwoDdg3w)/["Foreshadowed"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSMBgzwu6IE)

* * *

 8 October 1961

Paris, France 

“This is Pont Neuf,” John insisted.

“No, it’s not,” Paul said, equally emphatic, as he set the map down against the bridge railing and thrust an outstretched finger into the paper. “ _This_ is Pont des Arts. _That_ —” he pointed to the east, “—is Pont Neuf.”

John challenged him. “How do you know?”

Paul rubbed his nose. “Because _there’s_ the Louvre, and _that’s_ the French Institute, so that means that _this_ is—”

Julia began to giggle and broke away from the two of them and over to a man in the middle of the bridge who was setting up a hat and his accordion for a busking performance.

“ _Pardon,_ ” she said, in pitch perfect, beautifully-accented French. _“Quel est le nom de ce pont?_ ”

The man smiled and responded, and though John strained to hear his answer, the sound was lost to the Seine and the din of conversation as dozens of Parisians and tourists alike crossed the bridge around him. Julia nodded and thanked him, then strolled back over to the two warring bandmates, hands shoved confidently into her pockets.

“Pont des Arts,” she said.

Paul puffed his chest out.  


“Piss off,” John snarled, following it with a laugh.

“She taught herself to speak French,” Paul said to John. “Did yeh know that?”

John and Julia shared a covert glance between them; John remembered the bus ride from the month previous, but the protectiveness of those stolen moments together made him pause before saying anything to Paul. Instead he shook his head; relief washed over Julia’s face.

“ _C’est vrai,_ ” she smiled, crinkling her nose in the process. “Romantic, innit?”

The man with the accordion began to call out to Julia with a gravelly “ _Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle!_ ” She turned and gave him her attention, and after a moment and a few laughs—a conversation held in an entirely foreign language, the basics of which John barely grasped—she turned back to them.

“What’d he say?” Paul asked.

She shrugged and shoved her hands deeper into her pockets. “He says he wants to play a song for me. Because he thinks pretty girls should ‘ave pretty songs to listen to when they’re in Paris.” 

Ever the cynic, John shrugged. "He's good, that one. I bet that's how he fills up his hat every day."

Paul tossed a few coins in at the same time. 

Julia, leveraged between them both, seemed at a loss as she chuckled and looked to them for guidance. “I don’t know what song to pick.”

John sighed turned to the street musician. “Edith Piaf?” he asked.

“ _Ah, oui… ça marche. La Vie en Rose?_ ” he nodded. 

John shrugged. “Yeah, _oui_.”

The man with the accordion flashed a smile, his eyes sparkling as he adjusted the instrument strapped to his body. “Okay, English,” he said, his accent thick. “Edith Piaf, _pour la mademoiselle_.”

Julia smiled and the man began to play, and as he pushed forward with the song’s opening a crowd began to form and in an instant the scene was set and could not have been more perfect. Below them, the waters of the Seine flowed fast; the lights on the Institut de France to the south, the Louvre to the north, and the buildings lining the riverbank as far east as Notre Dame marked the boundaries of their sightlines in those directions. But far to the west and silhouetted against the pale sheen of the night sky was the Eiffel Tower, and for the first time since their early days walking the streets, John was hit with the sudden realization that he was _in Paris._

Not only that, but he was with his best friend and a clever girl, a girl from Speke who spoke French and stopped to take too many photographs on the crowded boulevards, a girl who was was dancing in the middle of a bridge with her eyes closed, who had an early morning train to catch and who didn’t want to sleep through her last night in the City of Lights and had decided, against all reason and good sense, to spend it with  _him_.

“Dance with me,” she beckoned to her travel companions.

John cocked his head in her direction. “That’s your cue, Nijinsky,” he said to Paul.

Paul laughed and shook his head. “Nah, mate. I’m knackered. You dance.”

“I’m no dancer,” John said.

“It’s not like it’s the fuckin’ foxtrot, John.”

Julia twirled, the hem of her long dark coat billowing as she spun, affecting the look of a cathedral bell; her laugh was the peal, the call to worship. John’s heart surged in his chest.

“ _Danse! Danse!_ “ the accordion player said, nearing the apogee just before the end of the chorus. “ _Imbécile! Une belle fille ne devrait jamais danser seule à Paris!_ ” Then he clucked his tongue and launched into the next section.

Paul sighed and scrubbed a hand through his hair, one hand shoved deep into his trouser pockets. Then he trod the worn boards beneath his feet and joined Julia in the centre of the bridge, where he took her in his arms and spun her around, much to her delight.

John watched with an ache in his belly; he pretended to be fishing for loose change in his pockets to give to the musician, knowing full well he had none left, because he needed the distraction. Even in the dim light of the bridge deck, he could see that they looked good together. _As if that’s the only thing that matters._ He sat on a bench in the middle of the bridge and waited for the song to finish.

When it did, Julia clapped with vigour and produced a handful of coins that she dropped into the man’s hat, smiling at him as the man bowed his head.

“Bloody wonderful,” she said, pushing her hair back behind her ears. The accordionist smiled graciously and then turned his attention to another potential customer.

“Mercy buckets,” John said to the man’s back. Beside him, Julia threw her face to the sky and laughed and laughed...

The three of them continued on their walk across the bridge toward the Left Bank, Julia sandwiched between and keeping pace with her long-legged companions excepting those moments when she stopped to take a photo. John had at first been impatient with her—she couldn’t go more than ten feet without stopping for snapshots. But eventually he warmed up to it, expected it, and even encouraged it, suggesting interesting vantage points and scenes as though he’d been a photographer himself for his whole life.

“Why the sudden interest in photography?” Paul had quipped earlier that day, out of Julia’s earshot as she perched her Rolleiflex on a traffic bollard to snap a photo of the Arc de Triomphe.

John didn’t provide an answer; he knew he didn’t have one. But he wasn’t ashamed. He knew that, lurking on the rolls of film she was carrying in her shoulder bag—the only bag she’d kept with her after sending the rest of her luggage home ahead of her on a train that departed earlier that morning—were scenes he had suggested and that she had photographed. A silent partnership; he, the picture-maker, and she, the picture-taker. That was reason enough, perhaps. But it was nothing he could share with Paul. 

Reasons why they had agreed to stay up with her through the night escaped John when he calmly and rationally thought about it; but as he watched her skip along the street, singing “La Vie en Rose” in a charmingly untutored mezzo-soprano, it wasn’t hard to remember.

Still, the hours they had walked around Paris that day were seared into the soles of their feet and written in the slant of their shoulders as they pitched their way along the sidewalk where Quai de Conti became Quai des Grands Augustins, heading east. Ahead of them, the lights and sounds of the Latin Quarter began to take prominence over the relative quiet of the riverscape; John hoped a drink and some food would give him a second wind. It wasn’t quite nine o’clock, and Julia’s train was not due to depart for Calais for nearly ten hours, and she had no intention of sleeping away her last night in the French capital.

Passing by the _bouquiniste_ street stalls, filled to bursting with old books and touristy knick-knacks, Julia paused and began to browse.

“I’m starvin’,” John sighed. 

“You wanna stop somewhere?” Paul asked.

“Mmm,” Julia cooed, looking up from the book in her hands. “I could most certainly go for a croissant…”

John was hoping for more than baked goods, but he nodded anyway. “Where then?”

Julia wasn’t listening; instead, she was bargaining with the bookseller, working him down from the sticker price until she was satisfied. She handed him another palmful of carefully counted francs— _Where was she getting the money?_ John wondered, before remembering the meagre inheritance her father was supposed to have left her—and moved to shove the book into her bag.

“What’d you buy?” Paul asked.

“ _Finnegan’s Wake,_ ” she said, turning the book over in her hand with renewed interest. “I think it’s a first edition. I love old books, don’t you?”

“Well that’s hardly old,” John teased, snatching the tome from her hands and flipping it open. “Christ, I was toddlin’ ‘round the school yard when this was published.”

Julia snatched the book back, undeterred. “ _Obviously_ , I don’t mean _this_ book,” she replied.

John shook his head. “Books are books. I mean, old or new, it’s the same shite inside, innit?”

Paul, ever the crowd-pleaser, leapt to her defense with all the forthright opinion of a good A-level English schoolboy. “Old books have character, a history,” he said. “I think they’re charming.”

Julia dropped the book into her bag. “I’ve never read this one. But Dad… he had a copy. He loved James Joyce.”

It was the first time all day that she had mentioned her father, and the sudden cloud over her head betrayed every inch of her grief even as she just as swiftly snapped back and flashed her carefree smile at them both. 

Paul stepped a little closer to her. “You never did say how things went...” he said, asking the question that neither of them had dared ask all day.

Julia shrugged. “Fine,” she replied. “There’s not a lot of money left but Dad made quite a nice living off of his writings here.” 

John sensed that this wasn’t the full story. When they’d picked her up that morning from the small apartment she had been staying in with her father’s widow, the address of which she’d scrawled in her notebook all those weeks ago, the overpowering patina of poverty was the first thing John had noticed. If this was the place where her father had lived and died, he did so without fame or fortune. Julia, he reckoned, was either deluding herself or lying; either way, the pretense was unnecessary, and he wanted to tell her so, but he lacked the words and the nerve to do it.

But she barrelled on with her story. “I told his wife she could sell everything and keep the proceeds. I don’t really need anything from him. I just took what I could carry, you know, the things I wanted—a bit of money, a few letters, a photograph, and his copy of _Dubliners_. Do you wanna see it?”

Before they’d had a chance to answer, she had pulled that book out of her bag and was offering it to them, rambling proof of a romantic but false vision of a father who had just died a second death in the wanting eyes of his only daughter.

“It’s sentimental,” she said, thumbing the dog-eared and well-worn pages. “Dad used to read to me from this when I was little.”

Paul tried to wrap his arm around her waist, a comforting gesture, but Julia gently shrugged him off in one fluid motion. 

Paul was seemingly unperturbed. “That’s what I’d probably take, too.”

“Yeah,” she said, putting the book back in her bag and starting off again down the stall-lined street, in the shadow of Notre Dame, Paul at her heels, John lagging a bit farther behind.

They found a cafe on Rue de la Huchette where they shared a basket of _pain au chocolate_ and two cups each of strong espresso, hoping that the caffeine would keep them up for the long haul night ahead of them. What they didn’t eat they packed away, wrapping baguette slices in napkins to shove into pockets for later in the evening. Julia paid for the meal out of the meagre inheritance John imagined was sitting, in its entirety, in a worn envelope at the bottom of her satchel. 

However it had come about the food and drink did have its desired effect, reviving them all, and within the hour they were feeling adventurous enough to dip into the more potent of Paris’s beverage offerings. Julia, just shy of drinking age, feared getting caught, but the drinks kept coming in quick procession—pear and plum liqueurs, cheap cognac, brandies and, finally, absinthe. As the hour approached midnight, Julia was thoroughly drunk; while John had mostly kept his wits about him, Paul was almost as far gone.

The streets had cleared of most of the foot traffic; a few taxis roamed the narrow cobblestones, trawling for fares. The vast majority of _bouquiniste_ stalls had closed, the green boxes locked away until morning, but a few stood open, brazenly attempting to make sales from the few drunk passers-by who still made their way down the street.

Like a moth to a flame, Paul was drawn to the very last open stall, crowded with magazines and books. John watched with great amusement as he fumbled around with drunk hands desperately trying to appear in control of his faculties. He was fingering the edge of a silk scarf when John joined him.

“Whaddya think?” Paul asked.

“About what?”

“This,” he said, lifting the scarf off the little hook on which it was hung. “For Julia.”

John scowled and shrugged. “I don’t know, why don’t you ask her?” he said.

“Ask me what?” Julia chimed in. She had been leaning over the edge of the stone wall that led down to the river below, and pushed herself away from the precipice with such force that she almost knocked herself over. 

Paul held up the scarf. “Do you like this?”

She scrunched her nose. “It’s pretty.”

“But you don’t like it?” Paul was almost visibly deflated.

With alacrity, Julia’s eyes began to sparkle; her back-pedalling was impressive. “No, no, I don’t mean that. I just…” she stepped forward, unsteady on her feet, and touched the colourful fabric, a generous mix of purples and yellows and greens that looked like crocuses or daffodils to John’s hazy eyes.

Julia sighed. “I’m not a colour person. I’m not pastel, or watercolour. I’m charcoal. Graphite,” she shrugged and let the fabric fall from her fingers. “Just me. Just plain ol’ Jules.”

It was a strange statement, but she made it with such amazing precision that it didn’t seem to John to be a falsehood. He looked her over—ebony hair, grey coat, dark wool trousers, leather shoes—and knew she was right, in that moment. From her slate grey eyes to the stockings on her feet, Julia was charcoal.

Paul evidently saw things differently. “You _could_ be colour,” he whispered.

And then, for the first time that night, Julia initiated contact with Paul—reaching out a thin and delicate hand to caress his cheek. “Maybe,” she said. “One day.”

John averted his eyes, not wanting to intrude on what was becoming a quiet and private moment between would-be lovers. He kicked at a pebble and watched a handful of students crowd into a taxi across the street, shouting directions to the driver. 

When he turned back to the two of them, Paul was replacing the scarf; Julia, for the scantest of seconds, locked eyes with John. Hers were filled with tears.

“We should go back to the bridge,” she said. “Maybe the accordion player is still there.”

“Great idea!” Paul chimed in, glancing at his watch on his tromboning arm, trying to get the watch face to stay in focus as he read the time. “It’s almost midnight.”

“Then it’s your birthday,” Julia intoned in John’s direction. “Isn’t that right?”

John nodded but said nothing, and Paul took Julia’s hand and led her down the street toward the bridge. The accordionist was still there, playing to a few pigeons and the stragglers of Paris’s Sunday night scene. John kept pace with the two of them, but Paul reached the man’s hat first and began to scrounge around for coins in his pockets.

Julia dropped another fistful into the hat. “Any song!” she cried triumphantly. "For the birthday boy!" The man obliged, launching into something fast and giddy. Julia spun and spun, bell-like again, in the centre of the bridge, and Paul laughed and joined in. Arms outstretched, staring up at the stars, the pair of dervishes whirled together for a long moment before becoming a trio, as John’s last resistance to the silly fun crumbled and he gave in. 

For a spinning moment in time, John felt peaceful. But it wasn’t meant to last.

“John!” Paul cried out, and John stopped and opened his eyes. He was dizzy and facing the wrong way, and as he struggled to turn in the direction of Paul’s voice, he noticed the accordionist's song had stopped, as well. That fact, coupled with the fear in Paul’s voice, made John’s heart race. 

“Paul, what’s goin’ on?!” John cried, fumbling in his pocket for his glasses as his eyes adjusted and he took in the sight before him. Julia had pushed herself up onto the edge of the bridge, laughing and crying as she held onto the light standard beside her and stared over the precarious height into the depths of the Seine. 

John came to stand beside her on the bridge.

“Julia, get down!” Paul cried. 

“This isn’t funny!” John added.

The accordion player, too, was yelling in French for Julia to step back. But she stood, one arm hugging the metal light pole and the other stretched out and open to the sky as she tilted her face heavenward with laughter on her tongue.

“Look at me,” she was saying. “I’m a bird…”

Paul turned to John. “What do we do?”

John furrowed his brow. He'd gained Paul's side; Paul had his hand on the toe of Julia's shoe, as if that would be enough to keep her from tumbling into the water below. “How did she get up there in the first place?” 

"Well I didn't fuckin' put her there!" Paul shouted back. "Julia, please!"

John debated wrapping his arm around her legs and hauling her back down to the ground, but she was unsteady as it was, and so was he. If she fell...

Julia’s laughter turned to tears. She lowered her outstretched arm. “It’s bollocks,” she said at last through a sob. “It’s all fuckin’ bollocks.”

John saw her sway slightly, both hands gripping the pole for support, and she slowly began to turn around to face them again. He reached his hand to her hip as she bent her knees, still holding the lamp post. Paul took her other hand, and she dropped off the edge of the bridge and into Paul’s arms, weeping uncontrollably.

“What in the world were you thinkin’?” Paul snapped as he folded his arms around her shaking frame.

“I wasn’t going to jump,” she muttered. “I didn’t _want_ to jump…”

John scrubbed a hand over his face.“You didn’t have to _want_ to jump, Jules,” he said. “You’re drunk! You thought you could fly, fer chrissakes!”

The accordion player had backed away and was packing up his things, muttering in French and casting his eyes askance with barely concealed shock and disgust at Julia’s insane antics. She was still weeping, her back pressed to the railing. Slowly she spun around and cast her eyes down at the water below. Paul did the same, and in a moment, so had John; the three of them, standing along the edge of the Pont des Arts, catching their breath and calming their nerves.

"When your mums died, what did you do?"

The sound of her voice cutting through the silence shocked John. He'd almost forgotten where he was, who he was with, and what had just transpired.

"I don't know," Paul answered. "Cried. Got angry. Got laid."

John snorted, though not out of derision; he knew that that's probably close to exactly what Paul had done, because it's what Paul always did. In his mind, there was nothing that the comfort of a woman's bed couldn't fix.

Julia took another shuddering breath. “Do either of you know the story of _l’Inconnue de la Seine_?”

John shook his head; out of the corner of his eye, he saw Paul do the same.

Julia was staring down at the dark waters rippling below. “She was supposedly this beautiful woman whose body was pulled from the Seine in the late 1880s," she said." The mortician who was tasked with preparing her body thought she was so beautiful that he made a death mask of her face, and suddenly people started wanting copies of it to hang on their walls. Anybody who was anybody in _la belle époque_ had her face in their parlour.” She took a breath. "Nabokov wrote a poem about her. ' _Urging on this life's denouement, loving nothing upon this earth... the streetlights, the wind, the night clouds, the harsh river dappled with dark..._ '"

A breeze picked up as she recited the words, rushing along atop the water. John shivered. “That’s crazy.”

“Why are you tellin’ us this?” Paul asked.

Julia turned back to the water and wiped tear tracks off her cheeks. “Her body was found just over there, beside the Louvre,” she said, indicating with her hand to a spot just off to their right. “Maybe she jumped off this very bridge.”

Somewhere in the distance a clock chimed midnight. John felt a chill roll up his spine.

Beside him, Julia—shaking but recovering—nudged his elbow. “Happy Birthday, John.”

He might have murmured a response.

* * *

JOHN: I looked up that story, years later. The Nabokov poem too. She wasn't lying, Julia. Not about that. I think that made it all the more frightening in retrospect. That she was standing there, thinking about this poor woman who'd been memorialized in such a strange way, this beautiful woman with no name who jumped off a bridge in the heart of Paris. Had she been trying to fly too? Was she alone? Or were there bastards there on either side of her fighting about who-knows-what when she fell? 

WILSON: What happened after that?  
  
JOHN: We talked her out of the early train and convinced her to head back to where we were staying, which wasn’t all that far away, so she could get some proper sleep and rest up after the day out. It wasn’t easy, but she agreed. She slept on the bed and Paul and I shared the floor. ( _Pause_ ) I didn’t understand it. It all seemed crazy to me. ( _Pause_ ) I don't think either one of us slept a wink that night.

WILSON: Was she okay?

JOHN: I don’t know. She was drunk and she was distraught over losing her dad, having these romantic notions about her Father the Writer dashed beyond repair. Maybe she was upset with us, I don't know. But she was staring down the tunnel at a train and a ferry that was bringing her back to what I’m sure she considered hell on earth. How would you be?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For more info about L'Inconnue de la Seine: http://mentalfloss.com/article/22871/creepiest-thing-ever-linconnue-de-la-seine


	8. Les amours perdues ne se retouvent plus

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: ["Les amours perdues"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cplaHtlkEUM)/["Kinesthesia I"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoECdJR2GsY)

* * *

 MURPHY: What did you think about Julia and John’s friendship?

PAUL: Are you kidding me? I thought it was great! My best mate and my would-be girlfriend getting along—it was brilliant!

MURPHY: You weren’t jealous?

PAUL: No. ( _Pause_ ) Well… yes and no. Maybe when it came to John and Julia I just… I thought we were so different that any girl who would go for me would never go for John…

* * *

13 October 1961

Somewhere in Worcestershire…

Hitching a ride back to England in the back of a hay truck, with exactly no money between the two of them, hadn’t been the way Paul imagined his and John’s grand return from Paris would play out. But as he stared up at the dark early evening sky an hour outside of London on their way north, he felt like the trip was, still, a tremendous success.

It wasn’t so cold that they couldn’t get truly comfortable, but they huddled together nevertheless under a blanket the driver had found beneath the front seat because, as John said, it added to the romantic mystique.

Paul rested his head against a dry bale on his right; John sat on his left. The driver had given them two bottles of cola to drink when they hopped in; now, an hour later, the drinks were nearly gone, and John had been moaning about his need for something warm, or something alcoholic, to help keep the blood from freezing in his veins.

“Some trip,” John said, finishing the last of his bottle and tossing it over the side of the truck. The glass could be heard clattering on the motorway for some time before disappearing into the night.

“You can say that again.”

“Some trip.”  


Paul glanced at John, who sniggered.

“What time are they expecting us?” Paul asked.

John shifted so he could check his watch. “An hour or so. We’ll be back by then.”

“You think?”  


“Guaranteed.”

Paul was silent for a moment, watching the English countryside pass them by in muted shades of blues and blacks

“I wonder what the lads will think of our hair?” John asked, smoothing his hands over the fringe that skimmed his forehead.

Paul smirked. “I have no idea, but I don’t think there’s much we can do about it now.” For emphasis, he ran his hand back through his hair; it flopped back over his eyes, just as it had done every time since Jurgen cut it a few days before; no matter how many times Paul tried to slick it back into the Teddy Boy DA he’d had when he left Liverpool, his hair would not cooperate. John laughed.

“The girls won’t recognize us,” John said. 

“I can’t wait to see Julia's face,” Paul looked down at his hands.

“Don’t you mean Dot?”

Paul played dumb. “That’s what I said. I can’t wait to see Dot’s face.” Leaning his head back against the hay, he hoped John would drop the subject. The older boy eyed him for a long time before looking out the back of the truck.

“Right, Macca,” John said.

Paul fingered his empty bottle, leaving smudged and oily prints along the sides that shone in the silver moonlight, and then wiping them away again on his pant leg. “So you like her then?” he asked. “Jules?”

John shrugged. “What does it matter if I like her?” he asked. “Do _you_ like her?”

Paul also shrugged. “Dunno. I s’pose so. She’s got a look about her…”

John nodded but said nothing. Paul could have taken this as a sign that John wasn’t interested and the conversation was over; instead, he barrelled ahead. “I mean, she’s pretty, right? Seems like good wife material.”

“Christ, not you too,” John drawled. “You’re nineteen! Who thinks about gettin’ married at nineteen?”

“I know,” Paul laughed, suddenly uneasy.

John took a breath. “I think she’s a little off-kilter, don’t you?” he asked.

Paul remembered how he’d felt as Julia leapt up onto the bridge’s edge; he shuddered. “You said it yourself, she was drunk.”

“Yeah, well,” John muttered. “So were you, and I didn’t have to pull you off a ledge.”

Paul mumbled a response and went quiet. Twice now, Paul had witnessed Julia’s strange antics almost bring about the premature end of her life. Closing his eyes, he could still see how close to the edge she had been standing, the lapping of the water so far below, the same way he’d felt the night she wouldn’t get out of the way of the car on Mather Avenue. But this last time, punctuated as it was by the story of the girl in the river, chilled him thoroughly. All her talk of death made him uneasy; he didn’t know what to do about it.

“I had fun though,” John said.

“Yeah?”  


“ Yeah,” he nodded. “Thanks mate.”

The pair fell asleep against the hay, slumbering through the rest of the drive home.

*

Although it wasn’t meant to be a surprise party, it turned into one for the invited guests when the two wandering troubadours marched into the Jacaranda with their hair flattened and drooping in their eyes, shocking their friends into a stunned hush.

“What in the bloody ‘ell ‘ave you done?” Pete cried out, breaking the silence. “Christ! First you go off to France without us and now… .”

Cynthia stepped over and found her voice, running hands over the top of John’s head in disbelief. Finally, she grinned. “I like it.”

“And ‘er’s is the only vote that counts,” John growled, pressing his hands to either side of Cynthia’s face and kissing her hello.

Paul tried to play it cool, running a hand over the top of his head, expecting to feel the all-too-familiar quiff but landing on the sideswept fringe instead. He was suddenly even more self-conscious about the hairstyle. He looked around at the faces smiling back at him and John, wishing many happy belated returns for John’s twenty-first birthday. Nobody seemed to notice him; he felt like slipping away into the darkened Liverpool night and going home instead.

But it was Dot who whispered through the crowd toward him. “Hello love,” she said, winding herself around him and leaping up on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek. “Did you miss me?”  
Paul smiled down at the pixieish blonde clinging to his frame. She smiled, her eyes squinting shut as she did. He kissed her forehead.

“Hello, Dot,” was all he said.

She seemed dismayed; Paul knew only too well what he _should_ have said, but was damned if he couldn’t get the words past his lips. His mouth felt sandy, dry, parched from the long, cold ride home. But beyond that, he knew the woman at his side was no longer the one who’d once occupied his mind; _that_ woman, he quickly realized, was nowhere to be found. 

“Didn’t you miss me?” she prodded.

“‘Course I did!” he exclaimed. “I’m just tired, that’s all.”

Far from perfect, his words seemed to do the trick. Dot pulled her arms out from under his and sat down on the bench beside George, leaving plenty of room for Paul to join her; but when John took the seat instead and pulled Cynthia onto his lap, Paul exaggerated the shrug of his shoulders for her sake and continued to stand. Things were easier, he knew, the farther he was from Dot.

From somewhere in the back, someone came out with a cake, and everyone broke into a chorus of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Paul used the commotion to slip away into the recesses of the room, away from John and the revellers, away from Dot. When John blew the flames out, he kissed Cynthia. Paul, watching from a distance, had never felt lonelier.

The Jac was filled with the regular night time crowd before too long, all drinking coffee and liqueurs, with a shifting, drifting ocean of cigarette smoke hanging above their heads, obscuring the ceiling. By that point in the evening, Paul found himself sitting alone in a back booth, drinking small sips from a cup of coffee in front of him, trying to sober up after consuming two pints in quick succession and still finding himself cold and numb from the ride in the hay truck. He wanted to go home; he wanted a bath and to collapse into his bed and sleep for an entire day. His mind was hazy; he had lost track of Dot, and John had left with Cynthia after a little less than an hour. But rather than being upset about his solitude, Paul relished it. He took slow pulls from his mug, imagined the coffee in his system, replacing the blood in his veins, waking and warming him up from the inside out.

Suddenly the bench shifted, almost imperceptibly; Julia was sitting next to him. 

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

“Been avoiding me?”  


“What would give you that impression?”  


She shrugged, “Oh, I don’t know, the fact that we’ve been here for over two hours and you haven’t said hi to me until just now.”

“I didn’t see you,” he replied, honestly.

There was a pause. They both broke the silence at the same time.

“I was thinking,” said Paul.

“I met Dot.”

Paul felt his heart sink. He turned to face Julia; his voice quavered even as he tried to put on a brave face. “Did you now?”

Julia nodded and sipped her coffee. “Cynthia introduced us this evening. Why didn’t you tell me you had a girlfriend?”

She didn’t seem too upset about it. He remembered the feel of her in his arms as they danced in the middle of the bridge to French love songs. _That’s why,_ Paul thought as he shrugged. 

“I didn’t think it was important,” was his reply. 

She nodded. “Well, I like her. She’s good for you.”

Paul smiled, but his head wasn’t in it. In that moment, across the room, Dot was flirting with a bloke in a sweater vest near the jukebox. As he watched, he became acutely aware of the change that had come over him. Mere months ago, the sight of Dot even looking at another man might have sent him into a tailspin of jealousy and possessiveness. More than once, for less serious offences, Paul had dragged Dot home from such-and-such a bar or such-and-such a performance hall and given her stern and very serious warnings that they’d be through if she ever so much as _dared_ to behave in such a way in public ever again. His temper when it came to her could be violent; he’d never struck her before, but he’d come close many, many times.

Now, he saw her giggle and pat a fly-away hair down behind her ear, and he felt… _nothing_. 

He sipped from his coffee cup and tried to remember what it was like to rage over the supposed infidelities and romantic indiscretions of Dorothy Rhone. The memory was distant, the feelings dampened. 

“There’s nothing left,” he said softly. He hadn’t meant to speak the words aloud; the sound of his own voice startled him. He blushed, looking into his coffee cup. “I mean… my coffee… I need more coffee.”

But Julia had followed the line of Paul’s gaze to the jukebox and suddenly got wise; she turned back to face him. “Is that so?” she asked.

She sat up then, arching her back in an effort to crack it into compliance. The buttons on the front of her dark blue and grey blouse gaped as they stretched over the peak of her breasts; Paul tried not to stare. After she’d seemingly popped every last vertebra in her spine, she nodded slowly and brought her mug up for a drink. Paul focused his eyes on the scene, watching as she pressed her mouth to the edge of the mug, tilted the glass until he could see coffee, saw her lips part and the dark liquid spill up and over as she drank. Her lips plumped and the hot coffee stained her with heat wherever it touched; her mouth was moistened from the coffee and glistened in the dim light of the club. Paul shifted in his seat, hiding his sudden erection against the tight, straining fabric in his lap.

“Is what so?” he asked.

“Are you out of coffee?” She seemed amused by the whole exchange, as if she knew that what she was doing was driving him to madness. 

“I don’t want anymore,” he replied, pushing his cup away from him. It was all he could do to keep from diving into her. One look at the tightness of her shirt, the swell of her breasts, the plumpness of her lips, and Paul knew he had two options: end it with Dot, or get away from Julia.

“We missed you after you left,” he told her.

She smiled. “ _We’ll always have Paris,_ ” she winked. 

It was then that he remembered his gift for her; folded into a neat square at the bottom of the bag was the beautiful silk scarf he’d tried to convince her to buy on their one night together in Paris. With no one else around, and those nearby not paying attention, he dug into the bag and retrieved it.

“What’s this?”

“Remember?” he asked

She smiled, holding the fabric in her hand. “You wanted me to be a colour,” she breathed.

“That’s right,” he said. “I went back and bought it the next day.”

She fingered the fabric in her hands. “Paul, I—”

“I know, if you can’t, that’s fine. But—”

But she cut him off by unfolding the scarf, wrapping it around her slender neck, and tying it to the side in a small bow. Against the paleness of her skin and the indigo blue of her top, the floral shades were a lovely contrast. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “Thank you.”

She reached towards him then, resting her hand on his shoulder as she kissed him on the cheek. And she lingered there, lips pressed to day-old stubble just this side of the corner of his mouth; he smelled the shampoo she used, delicately playing in the soft espresso-dark strands of her hair. Intimately close, he hesitated before reaching with his arms, tightening them around her lithe frame in a return embrace. The warmth of her body passed through his thin sweater and seemed to invade him. She radiated; he absorbed. He never wanted to let go.

That night, in the soft, moonlit quiet of his own room, distracted to the point of insanity, Paul pleasured himself. When he came, gripping the bedsheets and his own length beneath him, he buried his face in his pillow, dampening his cries as he thrust once, twice, and emptied himself into his closed fist. 

He was sure he called Julia’s name.


	9. The Dead Mothers Society

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: ["First Harvest"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9ihoCcjS_4)/["Orphans"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BrV66alDG8)

* * *

WILSON: So is that when you first start noticing signs of trouble with her?

JOHN: Well, like I told you, Stu’s comments were what tipped me off at first. And then that night when we talked along the Mersey, and all the stuff she said about her mum, about her mum’s boyfriend wanting to marry her and being after her since she was a girl. That was pretty twisted. But what happened in Paris… that scared the absolute living daylights out of me. Straight up. And yet you couldn't tear me away from her. ( _Pause_ ) I honestly can't explain it.

WILSON: Did you ever talk to Paul about it?

JOHN: About what? I was this dumb kid, caught up in my own world, with my own shit to deal with. And nobody talked about their feelings. Not back then. But we tried to… you know… in our own little way, we bonded over it. The three of us, motherless vagrants. ( _Pause_ ) We had this ridiculous little club, and we’d meet once every few weeks, get shit-faced and lark about. It was Jules's idea, morbid at first you know but we grew to appreciate it. We needed that, maybe. A kind of catharsis, I suppose.

WILSON: What kind of a club?

* * *

PAUL: Oh, ‘The Dead Mothers Society’? That was all Julia…

* * *

8 December 1961

251 Menlove Avenue

In an upstairs room at Aunt Mimi’s, Paul and Julia sat in front of John, who stood one-legged and humming behind of a cluster of flaming, cheap pillar candles pinched from the altar at St. Peter’s Church six weeks earlier.

Paul remembered that escapade all too well: the night Julia had slipped into the church pretending to be there for choir rehearsal and had later thrown a half dozen beeswax candles out an open window to the waiting arms of John and Paul below. For all his guilt over stealing from the Church it had been a thrilling night for Paul, culminating in a cleaning lady spotting Julia as she’d slipped out the same window and dropped into the hedges below. Paul had hauled her to her feet and the three of them had taken off running, along Church Road and down the winding lanes of Woolton Village, hopping the wall to find refuge in the vast forested property along Beaconsfield Road that John loved so much.

It was there in a sheltered grove in Strawberry Field that they held their first meeting, and until the weather started to turn murky and it got too cold to hold meetings outside, once a week the three of them had scaled the walls and picked a spot amongst the trees to sit and chant and forget who they were for a little while. 

On this late afternoon, with the sun setting low on the horizon and a performance that night weighing on his mind, Paul had been happier than usual to skip out on his family dinner. He’d met Julia and John at Mendips for the fifth assembly of their little club. There, in the darkened room—and in spite of the fact that he didn’t really live there anymore—John lit each of the candles and waited for the glow to ensconce the trio before assuming his full height, closing his eyes, and standing on one leg to recite the now-official opening salutation.

“I now declare the fifth meeting of Merseyside’s Finest One and Only Association for Motherless Vagrants and No-Goodniks & Old Time Supper Club, also known as The Dead Mothers Society, on this, the eighth day of December, nineteen-hundred-and-sixty-one, open.”

Julia giggled, sitting cross-legged at Paul’s left. She had her camera perched on her knee as she snapped photo after photo of John in his asinine get-up: a brown towel wrapped around his head as his “turban”, a purple blouse from amongst Mimi’s things, a glittery scarf looped and tied around his belt. He looked ridiculous, and every time Julia laughed, he lapped it up. 

Paul wasn’t paying attention to John, though. His eyes were trained on the woman clicking away at his side, whose dark hair ebonized the air around her, leaving only her pale skin to glow in the candlelight. She had a scarf wrapped around her head as well and a pair of hooped gypsy earrings dangling from her earlobes; dark kohl eyeliner and smudgy red lips completed the transformation of Julia into the Society’s Mistress of the Night. 

“Let thy grief overfloweth,” Julia fake-chanted, still shooting photos, as she nudged Paul to remind him to join in, “Thy mirth runneth inneth, and always let thy music be merry.”

“So let it be,” John said, bringing a chalice of some indeterminate alcoholic beverage to his lips and taking a swig before passing it to Paul.

Paul bit back his gag reflex as he swallowed a mouthful of the awful-tasting stuff and handed the cup to Julia. 

“What’s on the agenda tonight Johnny, O Mystical Bard?” she asked playfully.

John sat where he stood, “An excellent question, Mistress,” John said. “I think it’s high time we pass ‘round a few ghost stories ‘ere until the High Priest over there wets ‘is pants.”

“Clever,” Paul smirked at his friend.

“Oh, let me go first,” Julia cried. “It is my birthday tomorrow, after all.”

Both men turned to look at Julia, shock on their faces. Julia clapped her hands to her cheeks and laughed.

“What?” Paul asked.

“Well hoppy birdie, Julie-Boo,” John said.

Julia blushed from behind her hands. “Ta.”

“You never mentioned that,” Paul said. “I would've planned something fer you.”

“Nah,” she shook her head, “I don’t want to make it a big deal. It doesn’t really feel like something to celebrate, you know?”

“Bollocks!” Paul cried. “You only get to turn eighteen once.”

“I suppose,” she said, as if it were the first time she'd considered it. “There’s just so much going on, I almost forgot it was my birthday.” She stopped talking for a moment, lightly fingering the edge of her camera body. “I'll be moving to a new place soon.”

“Really?” Paul asked. His mind swam in the deep waters of the sudden realization that Julia having a place of her own could be the start of something much bigger for the two of them; a turning point in their relationship. He also wondered, all of a sudden, why he was only hearing about this now.

“Yeah,” she said. “I don’t know—it’s just…it’s not working out at home. I’m done with all that.”

She cast her eyes up at John, a brief glance across the space between them, before she went back to studying her camera.

“It’s hard to find a place though, you know. A place that’s safe, reasonably priced. I might have to drop out of the art college.”

“Why?” Paul asked.

“Well, I’ll have to find a job, and after this year I have to start paying school fees and I can’t afford that…”

“We could help you move,” Paul chirped. “Could help you find a place, get your things moved in. Neil has the van. It wouldn’t be any trouble—we’d all pitch in, and—”

“Well don’t go gettin’ too far ahead of yerself,” she said. “I don’t know what’s happening and I don’t have that much to move anyway.”

“Right,” Paul said. “But if you did…”

She set her camera down. “You’re like a puppy sometimes,” she grinned at him. 

John barked softly, and Julia giggled. Paul watched as Julia smiled at John, and saw John smile back. It made him uncomfortable. His stomach pitted as familiar jealousies he hadn’t felt since things with Dot had gone south began to rear up in him, suspicious of his best friend’s intentions in a way he’d never been before. He whipped out his watch and glanced at the time. “Shouldn’t we get going?” he said.

“Right,” John nodded with a slight shake of his head. “You hungry?”

“I could eat!” Julia smiled. “Are you providin’?”

“Mimi oughta have somethin’ in the icebox,” he said.

“That’ll do, Lennon,” Julia said, and with that, John stood up and strode from the room.

Julia watched him leave. “This is fun, the three of us larkin’ about—”

“Yer actin’ strange,” Paul said. “What’s going on with you?”

She hunched over her crossed knees. “Nothing.”

“No, it’s something,” he said. “You’re sad one minute and giggling like a banshee the next.”

She shrugged. “It’s complicated, Paul.”

“Try me,” he ordered. “Why don’t you start by telling me why I’m only findin’ out about yer big move now?”  


She sighed. “What do you want me to say? I didn’t want to bother you with it.”

“What bothers me is that you’re hiding things, Jules,” he said. “What is this if you can’t even trust me?”

She shrugged. “I wanted to handle it on my own, that’s all.”

It was a reasonable request, one he couldn’t really deny her. “Well you don’t _hafta_ do it alone, is all I’m sayin’.”  


“I know,” she smiled. “It’s sweet. Really it is.”

When she didn’t immediately elaborate, Paul nudged her. “Not to belabour a point, but… well, aren’t yeh gonna tell me what’s going on at home?”  


Julia looked into the candle flames. She steepled her fingers under her chin, sighing enough to make the flames flicker and dance, casting shadows around the room. “I don’t feel… welcome anymore?” She said it like a question, like she was searching for the words and wasn’t entirely sure the ones she’d picked were right. Then she plucked the hoops from her earlobes. “It’s a miserable situation. You’d want to leave too if you lived with _him._ ”

“Yer step dad?”

Julia nodded, tossing the earrings into her bag. “I’m done with that. You know, it wasn’t enough for him to be like that with me mum. I should’ve stood up to ‘im. Maybe mum wouldn’t’ve…”

Paul held his breath, frightened that if he moved a muscle, even barely, she’d stop telling him the things he so desperately wanted her to tell him…

But it was for naught. Julia shook her head. 

“Sod it,” she said. “‘E’s a cunt and a bastard and if he died tomorrow it wouldn’t be soon enough.”

Paul had never met the man, and Julia had rarely, if ever, spoken about him in detail. These little epithets spat into their conversations were all Paul had, and they painted a rather ghastly picture. 

“What’d he do, then?” Paul asked. “I mean, what’s wrong with ‘im?”

Julia’s face remained emotionless, but the façade was trembling. “Can’t we talk about something else, Paul?”

He set his lips in a line but conceded the point. “Fine. We can talk about what’s gonna happen when you get yer own place. Between us.”

“Whaddya mean, us?” Julia asked. “You and me, like?”

“What do you _think_ I mean?”

Julia shrugged. “Us,” she whispered. “I didn’t know there was an ‘us’ to begin with.”

Paul studied the candles for a moment, their wicks glowing hot and puddles of wax forming in the burned out craters. “Of course there’s an us,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I just… I’ve never had a real boyfriend before. I’m not sure how it all works.”

Paul glanced at her, still wearing the scarf around her head. It was, he noticed then, the one he’d bought for her in Paris. He couldn’t be angry with her; he couldn’t even be disappointed that she had misread his intentions toward her. Perhaps that had been his fault.

He inhaled deeply and made a conscious effort to drop the subject. “We’re gonna miss yer birthday,” he told her. “We’re in Aldershot all day tomorrow.”

“That’s all right,” she replied. “We can celebrate tonight.”

Paul looked at the candles again. “Why don’t you make a wish and blow them out then?”

She laughed—a bright and cheerful sound totally at odds with the sombre tone of their conversation—and glanced at the pillared grouping. “These? You want me to make a birthday wish on these? Candles nicked from the Church that we use in a quasi-pagan ritual honoring our dead mothers?”

Paul shrugged. “Sure why not.”

She laughed again and shook her head. “It’s a good thing I don’t go to Mass anymore,” she said as she closed her eyes, leaned over the flames, took a deep breath, and blew.

All but two candles blew out, pitching the room even further into darkness.

“Ah! Two boyfriends!” Paul teased.

“I’m a busy girl.”

“Well you’ve got to finish it off. ‘Ave you got another wish?”

She cast her eyes skywards in mock thought. “Eah, nope, don’t think so.”

“You’re tellin’ me you’ve got everything you want?”

She paused, briefly, then nodded her head. With another quick breath, she blew out the final two candles. An instant later, she had crept up beside him, feeling her way through the dark until her hand brushed his knee. He opened his mouth to speak, but Julia pressed a finger to his lips.

“I will have,” she said, and then without any further wrangling pushed herself up so they were eye level, inches apart, and replaced her finger with her lips.

Surprise wouldn’t have come close to accurately describing how Paul felt in the instant he first kissed Julia. In all the months of waiting for it to happen, he was as close to bowled over as he could have been by the fact that it _was,_ finally, happening. Chaste at first, he didn’t dare move a muscle for fear of waking up. Everything halted, the world stopping for a moment to give them enough time and space to figure out how it felt, where to go from here. But eventually he felt her hand grazing his thigh, her fingertips kneading into the fabric, and she tilted her head to the side, releasing the pressure with which she had adhered herself to him in the first place. 

She was pulling away; it would simply not do.

Paul seized the moment to haul her closer, taking her by the shoulders and pressing himself into her, crushing her lips with gentle aggression. She didn’t protest; her body melted in his grasp and he felt her hands—warm and small—moving against his chest and under his arms to circle around his back, pulling him even closer. Her lips parted and he took the invitation, tasting the warmth of her mouth for the first time. Sealing his mouth to hers, she moaned her response, but the muffled sounds died against him.

It was cautious and studied but ravenous in its own sweetly seductive way; Paul had not imagined that something so timidly virginal could also be so erotic. As his body responded in kind, his head swam, and he wondered if he could get away with making love to Julia on the floor of John Lennon’s Aunt Mimi’s respectable suburban semi-detached.

He didn’t have to wonder long; within seconds, footsteps on the stairs caused them to tear apart. The sundering nearly broke Paul; he gasped and wiped his mouth, fearing that he’d see blood on his hand when he pulled it away. The door opened; John stood backlit from the hall.

“You lot ready?”

Paul and Julia exchanged a quick and silent agreement, which Paul gave voice to. “Yeah, just a minute.”

“We don’t wanna be late,” he said. “Especially not on account of a snog.”

He laughed to himself as he walked back down the hallway. Julia pressed her hands to her cheeks. 

“Right then,” Paul said.

“We should clean up.”

They tidied the candles, throwing them back into the sack Julia carried them over in, and stacked the dishes to bring downstairs. They made it to the hallway before Paul realized she was still wearing the scarf around her hair. He gently thumbed it off, using his proximity to her to plant another soft kiss on the corner of her mouth.

“Happy Birthday.”

“Thanks,” she smiled, her face flushed. She tossed the scarf into her bag and the two of them marched down the stairs to meet John at the door.

* * *

( _Papers rustling; a chair scrapes across the floor; somewhere nearby, a glass is placed on a table top_ )

JOHN: That gutted me, seeing them kiss. But what was I supposed to do? Paul had staked his claim. That was that. ( _Pause_ ) I knew why she wanted to move and why it was so important to do it then, all of a sudden, so close to her eighteenth birthday. But it was soon forgotten in the haze of Christmas and bookings and all of that. Maybe I should have understood that there was more to it. Because for a few weeks there, she only really went home to sleep. She would go to school, and when she wasn’t in school she was at the pubs, or with Paul, or at our shows. She would stay out as late as possible, always the last one to leave. She just didn’t want to be home. ( _Pause_ ) I remember she was always being invited over for supper—especially over at the Harrisons. George’s mum liked her a lot. All the parents liked her. She was polite and spirited in just the right amounts. It was part of her charm—she could turn it on for anyone, be exactly what anyone and everyone needed her to be, so it was hard for people to dislike her. It worked like magic on everyone.

WILSON: Even Brian?

JOHN: ( _laugh_ ) Yeah, even Brian…


	10. A Cellarful of Noise

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: ["Jynweythek"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KD8kWksOmc)

* * *

 13 December 1961

The Cavern Club

The intimate fact that nothing was going on between Paul and Julia was knowable by nearly everyone within a certain radius of the exasperated teen. The kiss John had partially witnessed, five nights earlier after the closing of their Dead Mother’s Society meeting, appeared to be the only one they’d shared; Julia was—if Paul was to be believed, and who would lie about a thing like this?—still as pure as new-fallen snow, and physical contact between the two of them never went farther than lap-sitting and the occasional good-night peck on the cheek. To hear Paul tell it, it was nearly his undoing; he had _needs._ And edge-of-the-bed virgin Julia was not tending to them.

John found it all terribly amusing, though he kept those thoughts to himself. Julia’s ability to resist the charms of the baby-faced bass player was refreshing, especially in light of the fact that girls lined up for the chance to do what she was consistently turning down. 

But it still bothered John immensely. He kept wondering when Paul would get tired or bored and chuck her—when he could finally make his feelings known—and day-in day-out it never happened. Paul kept going back to the fount in spite of the resistance and disappointment that inevitably followed. And why shouldn’t he? For the first time in his life, someone he wanted didn’t want him back. It was mysterious and frustrating and seductive and terribly erotic, in its own way, to be chasing the unreachable. John knew if he had the chance, he would probably have taken the abuse too.

As it was, John was suffering a thousand shades of his own abuse. The beautiful, brilliant girl for whom he’d pined for months was a permanent fixture in his life because of his best friend, and there was nothing he could do about it except watch and wait and hope against hope…

Until then, there were bookings to be made and shows to perform. They’d just signed with a young enterprising businessman bent on managing their affairs. Brian Epstein seemed a straight-shooter, not one to mess around or mince words; he had promised bigger shows and more of them, with better pay, and was gunning for a record deal for the group, all things he seemed to be working tirelessly toward, even though he had not personally signed their management contract as a show of faith to the young men he’d taken under his wing. John respected that, and for that reason alone, Brian’s guidelines and expectations—about how to dress and how to talk, about girlfriends keeping a low profile, especially at shows—were adhered to but them all, and enforced to the letter, especially by John.

But it certainly didn’t mean the girls didn’t show.

An afternoon gig at The Cavern had pulled in a moderate crowd; the evening show was shaping up to be a much larger affair, with crowds congregating on Mathew Street, some warring over their favourite music group on that night’s triple bill. The fans of The Beatles were more vocal than Gerry and the Pacemakers’ and The Four Jays’ fans combined, and as the hour of the show approached, before the doors opened and the fans began to stream in, John listened eagerly to the sound of hundreds of girls screaming their name above his head.

Brian, seated across from him at the table, smirked. “You’ve got quite a pull, haven’t you?”

John shrugged. “They’re only ‘ere for Pete,” he drawled. “He’s the only reason _I’m_ here, as a matter of fact.”

Brian laughed and returned to the papers in front of him. “Is that it, eh?” he asked, looking up at John. 

John chuckled. He hadn’t been sure about Brian at the start, but in the weeks since they’d first met—and certainly in the last few days, since they had agreed to let him manage them—he’d warmed up considerably to the idea of Brian being around. In his unguarded moments, like this one, he seemed like someone John would get along with very much.

“So, what’s up tonight?” John asked, turning his attention to the papers.

Brian put down his pen and steepled his fingers. “Well if I’ve played my cards right—and I do believe I have—then the A&R man at Decca Records in London will be coming in to watch the performance.”

John was surprised; he let out a nervous, bemused chuckle. “Go on and pull the other one, Eppy,” he said, certain that the bespoke man in front of him would hate the diminutive epithet John had come up with.

But he simply nodded. “And if he likes what he hears, maybe an audition’ll be in the near future.”

“For Decca?”  


Again, Brian nodded.

John felt giddy. In amongst his record collection at home were records with Decca labels on them; artists he’d admired for years recorded Decca records. To think that he might get the chance to put the group’s name on a similar record label left him gobsmacked, to say the least. Such was his state of mind in that moment that he didn’t notice the commotion of George’s and Pete’s arrival through the main cellar door, the shouts from street level travelled down the stairwell, echoing off the cavernous Cavern’s main room, as the late arrivals sauntered in. 

“Three-fourths of the band,” Brian said, standing up to close his books and checking his watch. 

“Paul’s on his way,” Julia’s voice sounded, and John turned to look in her direction. She walked a half step behind George; John hadn’t even seen her come in. 

But he saw her now. In her long black skirt and black leather boots, a white mock turtleneck sticking up beneath the collar of her peacoat, with her hair shellacked and shining under the dim lights in the room, she was still an absolute vision; when John opened his mouth to speak, he directed it to her.

“We’ve got company tonight,” he said, standing up and walking over to the group, stopping when he’d gained Julia’s side. “Some bloke from Decca’s gonna be ‘ere to watch the show.”

“Not ‘some bloke’, John,” Brian corrected, but the smile on Julia’s face somehow drowned out all the sounds around them. George and Pete exchanged their own excited chatter, but John only had eyes for Julia. She blinked at John and cocked her head to the side.

“That’s wonderful news, John!” she said, reaching out to grab his arm. John, in his excitement, misread the gesture. He leaned in and embraced her. He didn’t even notice what was happening until he felt Julia’s own arm snake around his middle, her palm flattened against his back. She smelled of cold rain and perfume, and, pressed against his chest, he felt her shudder through an exhale that warmed his shoulder beneath the spot where her lips rested. Her excited giggle—the only sound he could hear—vibrated through him, and as she stepped into him, her pelvis lined up with his, he froze.

His heart thudded at the base of his throat as he closed his eyes and tightened his grip.

“So you must be Cynthia,” Brian said behind him, and as the sound broke over his auditory nerve, he felt Julia step back and away from him. 

“No,” she corrected. “I’m Julia. Julia Fitzpatrick.”

“She’s Paulie’s girl,” George added.

“One of ‘em,” Pete added.

John lowered his head and took a halting half-step back. 

“No, we’re just good friends,” Julia said, catching John’s eye. “We’re _all_ just good friends.”

Brian extended his hand towards her and she shook it, a smiling lighting in her eyes. 

“Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Julia.”

“Likewise,” she said. “I’ve heard so much about you. These lads think you positively hung the moon.”

George groaned. “Now ye’ve gone and ruined our image,” he fake-pouted.

Pete laughed. “We ‘ad him eating out of our hand,” he ribbed Julia.

Julia blushed, from the tops of her ears to the base of her throat, laughing as she raised her arm and rubbed the back of her neck. “I’m sorry.”

Brian waved his hand. “Ignore them,” he said. “Julia Fitzpatrick,” he repeated, as if in awe. “I’ve heard a lot about you, as well.”

“Have yeh?” she asked.

He nodded. “From the way Paul speaks of you, you’d think _you’re_ the one who hung the moon.”

And Julia blushed again. John watched her, enamoured, jealous, dumbstruck and punch-drunk. It was almost effortless the way she had charmed Brian; John had no idea how she did it. As George went on with an anecdote from their supper—Julia had been there as well, it seems; his parents _adored_ her—John once again felt the sounds of the old cavern around them disappear as he honed in on Julia, the reddish blush flaming her cheeks… the way her fingers delicately lifted to the edge of her turtleneck to pull the collar down and cool her off… the sight of a large mark on the side of her neck. 

A hickey? 

No, larger; painful. 

As Julia’s fingers brushed her skin over that area, she winced and let the fabric go, looking around the group to see if anyone had noticed.

John’s eyes found hers, and she knew he’d seen. Silently, she pleaded with him to ignore it. George was still talking; Pete had joined in, and Brian was fiddling with the papers on the table. Behind them all, Paul had arrived, and the sounds from the street once more filtered down, louder than before; always louder for Paul. 

But John didn’t let his eyes leave Julia’s, and she didn’t let hers leave his. Even as Paul sidled up behind her and planted a kiss of his own on her cheek, his hand brushed her neck, inches away from the painful mark hidden beneath the turtleneck. John almost said something, but bit back his words; Julia was forcing a smile across her lips, and as she did, she didn’t for a minute break eye contact with John.

“What’s this I hear about a special guest tonight?” Paul asked.

All eyes turned to John, who’d announced it moments earlier. Dumbfounded and unable to speak, John opened his mouth and blinked, though no sound came out. It fell to Brian to step up and make the announcement. But as a second round of cheers and rumblings shook the group, John noticed he wasn’t the only one immune to the excitement: even with Paul’s arm around her waist, Julia’s eyes, finally broken from his own, sat dormant and dark in her pale face.

* * *

 

( _Another long pause. More papers rustling. The clink of ice against glass)_

JOHN: By Christmas you had to be particularly cold and unfeeling to not be able to add it up, the way she’d started turning up for a show and then we wouldn’t see her again for a few days, and when she did come back she’d have these bruises. Unmistakable, they were. ( _Pause_ ) Jules was no wilting flower. And she never once ask to be saved or rescued. She kept everything so hidden from everyone. So I count it as a very lucky strike that I was where I was that night…


	11. Witnessed

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: ["Algebra of Darkness"](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8s3g0)

* * *

27 December 1961

The Cavern Club

Cyn had arrived with her usual gaggle of girlfriends just before their set; John had seen George and a nameless blonde just before they set foot on stage, chatting closely underneath one of the Cavern’s arches. Pete had been entertaining two attractive young women as well, though they weren’t familiar faces to John, so he wondered if they would count as infractions in Brian's eyes. 

Eppy's rules were Eppy's rules, and so far they’d been pretty good about avoiding pre-show distractions. One night of lapsed adherence wouldn’t break the bank.

At least he had hoped so. Of course, by the end of the set, all hopes had evaporated.

Julia was supposed to have been there too, but as they stepped onstage, she still hadn’t shown. John wasn’t sure how he’d react when she arrived; he wasn’t even less sure how Paul would react if she didn’t. He found out for sure b y their last number: Paul a full beat behind the rest of the band, so far gone into a world of distraction he might as well have not even shown up. 

To say he was a surly sonofabitch would have been an understatement. The final chord in “Long Tall Sally” hadn’t even rung out halfway and Paul was already itching to unplug, his hand poised above the cord. He bowed earlier than the rest, and was the first one off the stage, boots smacking the floorboards, a scowl on his face.

He found John moments later, when John was just coming around the corner to the backstage dressing room.

“What song were you playin’ out there, Paul?” John asked. “Because it certainly wasn’t the same one as what I was playin’!”

“Did you see Julia?”

“I tend to concentrate on my guitar and singing when I’m on stage,” was John’s retort.

Paul ignored the dig. “John, I’m worried. I didn’t see her at all.”

“I’m worried that you’re losin’ yer perspective! Is yer bass even in tune, mate? Do ye need glasses to read the setlist? Should we slow down fer you?”

“John…”

But John wasn’t backing down. “No, listen to me—yer either here or yer not. Tonight you weren’t. Simple as that. And I’m not ‘aving it again.”

George shuffled past on his way to the dressing room. “‘Scuse me, ladies,” he drawled with a chuckle as he passed. John ignored him and continued to lay into Paul.

“I could find ten bass players as competent as you who would sell their own mothers to the fuckin’ SS if it meant they got a chance to play up ‘ere with us!” 

He knew it was a lie and a bald-faced one at that; no one in Liverpool was as talented on bass as Paul, and no one knew that fact better than Macca himself.

“Language, John,” the posh voice of their new manager broke through the tension. Both men turned to look at Brian appeared beside them; he turned his attention to Paul, worry etched on his face. “Wasn’t our best set, was it?”

Paul took a deep breath. “Next one’ll be better.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Brian said, though he didn’t seem all that convinced. He cast his eyes between the two warring factions. “You never know who’s watching you, so we must always be focused.”

“It’s just—”

“Paul,” Brian cut him off. “Julia will get here when she gets here. In the meantime, you’re a contracted performer with a job to do, and that must come first.”

“Yes, sir,” Paul nodded.

Brian smiled. “This is precisely why we leave our personal lives far away from our professional ones,” he warned as he stepped between them on his way to the dressing room. “I’ll see you back out there shortly, boys.”

They waited until he had disappeared behind the door before continuing.

“Yessir,” John teased.

“Oh get over yerself, Lennon,” Paul muttered, pushing past John, bass in hand, as he followed their manager into the room at the end of the hall. John waited a second or two before doing the same, depositing his guitar with the others against the far wall. He grabbed his Woodbines and without saying a word spirited out the door again, past his bewildered bandmates and his waiting girlfriend, through the throngs in the sweaty cellar and up the stairs to Mathew Street. 

He pulled a cigarette from the package and produced a lighter and, with cold-trembling hands, lit the thing and took a long drag, stalking the cobblestones toward the end of the street. Ambient sounds—voices and car engines—replaced the rock and roll din from inside The Cavern, and John closed his eyes to listen. But all he could hear ringing inside his head were the crooked chords Paul had contributed to onstage. He took long drags from his cigarette and exhaled the smoke in big bursts, attempting to vanquish his frustration.

As he rounded the corner at the end of Mathew, a brisk breeze hit him square in the face, knocking what was left of the ciggie to the ground. He stepped back into the wind-shadow of the building beside him to light another but without the aid of a decent streetlamp, he fumbled blindly for his lighter. 

“Need a light?” 

John looked up and into the face of another, older man, ambling up the street with his back to the wind. A large man, about John’s height if he stood up straight but with an extra fifty pounds padding his frame, he shuffled on one lame foot; that, or he was so stumbling drunk that he had temporarily lost control of his extremities. He wore a cap on his head, the brim pulled down over his eyes; between that and the turned-up collar on his coat, John could only make out the lower half of his face, and even then he could only see it well when the man had finally closed in on him. Grizzled, a few day’s worth of stubble on his wide-set jaw, and with thick lips stained by tobacco, he looked terrible. John wondered if he should accept the man’s offer, but found himself nodding in spite of himself. 

The man produced a pack of matches, struck one, and held the flame out to John, sheltered within his beefy hands.

“Ta.”

The other man flicked the match into the gutter, where it sputtered in a puddle and died. 

“You seen a girl go by?” the other man asked, swaying a bit as he leaned back against the building with a belch that belied his state of sobriety. He held out his hand. “‘Bout this tall? Dark hair?”

He reeked of alcohol and body odour. John wished he wasn’t standing downwind. He took a drag of his cigarette and shook his head. “No, sorry.”

The other man shrugged and hunkered down in his jacket. “Cunt stole my car,” he said with a sniffle. “I know she’s comin’ down here. Goin’ to see some music group.”

John thought better than to advertise that he, himself, was in a music group, fearing that perhaps this man’s girl was on her way to see _them_ play. He might have felt like fighting but he certainly didn’t want to get into it with this guy. Instead he simply took another drag.

The man huffed and shoved his hands further into his pockets. “Ah fuck it,” he muttered as he pushed himself off the wall and continued his meander down the sidewalk.

John waited until the man was a decent distance on before cupping his hand to his mouth. “Hope you get yer car back.”

John stood there against the building for a long moment before electing to circle the block and head back. The cigarette had helped take his mind off of their performance and the edge off of his surly mood; his encounter with the strange man was also a welcome distraction. But he wasn’t ready to go back yet. It might have been billed as "The Beatles Xmas Party", but he wasn’t going to make any token appearances for fans until he was good and ready.

He changed his tune rather quickly as his short walk turned long, the icy breeze and the threat of a cold drizzle constantly hovering inches above his head. So it was with great enthusiasm that he rounded the corner again onto Mathew, this time from the east end of the street. He’d finished his cigarette; as he flicked the butt to the stones and ground it beneath the heel of his boot, he saw the same drunk man leaning against a white Citroën, sparring loudly with the car’s occupant. 

_Guess he found his car_ , John thought with a chuckle. He was about to head off down the street when the man threw open the car door and hauled the driver out by her hair. She landed hard against the cobblestones but stayed there only for a moment before being jerked back to her feet and pushed up against the car behind her. The shouting match that had started within the vehicle continued, angry words thrown back and forth about the car’s ownership and the rights of the young woman to use it called into question.

John was morbidly fascinated by the scene; he hung back, in a shadow just beyond the reach of the nearest streetlamp.

“I own this car,” he said, loud enough for John to hear it, even from a distance. “I own this car, and I own you.” Then he took her face in his hand, gripping her by the chin, and planted a forced kiss on her puckered lips. The woman wrenched out of his grasp, pushing him off-balance enough to gain the upper hand. Then she reeled back and spit in his face. 

John wasn’t about to involve himself in the domestic squabble that appeared to be unfolding before his eyes. But that changed the moment he saw the glint of a knife in the man’s hands. 

In an instant, the man had pressed the blade to the young woman’s face, the tip of it denting the skin along her jawbone. He leaned over her, drunkenly balancing his weight with one hand on the car’s hood, and his threatening stance produced a look of fear in the woman’s eyes that moved John to action.

“Hey!” John hollered to the nearly empty street, trying to get the man’s attention.

The man turned to look at John. “Eah, piss off, mate.”

“You wanna real fight?” John asked as he got closer.

The man turned to look at the girl, and as he did he slowly dragged the tip of the knife along the girl’s jaw. Whether by accident or design, it didn’t matter: he’d drawn blood. John could see it trickling down her neck just before her hand flew to her face.

She screamed. “John, no!” 

It was only then that John realized who the nameless, faceless young woman in front of him was. 

The last few steps between him and Julia’s attacker were closed in a matter of milliseconds. His hands formed fists at his sides before he had a chance to think about it; one well-placed swing of his fist connected with the man’s jaw, sending him wheeling backward and onto his backside in a puddle on the sidewalk. The knife clattered to the pavement.

John would have jumped on him and continued the well-deserved beating had Julia not put her hand on his arm to still his movements; so keyed up was he that he almost wheeled back and struck _her_ instead. But he didn’t; he had the foresight to kick the knife out of the drunken man’s reach before tearing his attention away from the crumpled body on the sidewalk and towards her. 

Julia clutched her face; small rivulets of blood snaked down the side of her neck, carried by cold raindrops beneath the collar of her jacket. She was crying.

“For fuck’s sake, Jules!”

“It’s nothing,” she insisted, unconvincingly. “He’s just drunk. It’s nothing.”

“You’re a fuckin’ whore!” the man shouted as he dragged himself to his feet, leaning against the bricks for support. “Who’s this? Yer fuckin’ boyfriend? ‘Ow many does that make?”

John took a menacing step toward the man, fists clenched. “I swear to god, mate, you take one more step—”

The older man fumed but backed off, stumbling away along the sidewalk and around the corner, out of sight. 

“Who the fuck was that?” 

“John—”

"He had a knife!" John said. "He coulda killed you!"

Julia's eyes darted all over his face as she searched for a reference point, something to steady her. 

"Who was he? Did you know him?"

"Stop, all right?" she begged. "It's nothing."

But John could plainly see it was more than what she was letting on. Standing there in front of him, shivering from adrenaline and the cold, Julia looked haggard and worn. The rain that had started sometime earlier had become a downpour. He shrugged off his coat and threw it around her shoulders and summed her up: aside from the bleeding wound, she had a blackened eye and bruises along her clavicle that extended beneath the collar of her blouse and the stiff support girdle he could see in the places where the fabric of the shirt had been torn. Without staring, he reached toward her and pulled his jacket closed over her chest; a protective, brotherly gesture. 

Julia took the opportunity to lean forward, into his arms, and as she rested against him, her hand still pressed against the knife wound on her face, she wept, shoulders shaking. John circled his arms around her, and for a long moment, that's how they stood.

“Are you okay?” he asked into her rain-dampened hair.

“Yeah.”  


“We should get you to a doctor. You might need stitches.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“You’re bleedin’.”

“I am?”

He pulled away and stepped back, taking her hand in his as he lifted it from her face. The wound was fairly superficial, and the bleeding wasn’t too bad. He shook his head. “Do you have a handkerchief?”  


“I-In my bag,” she stammered.

_What bag?_ he wondered, until he saw the leather purse on the sidewalk. He pulled a square kerchief from within and carefully wiped her damp skin, cleaning the blood from her neck as best he could before placing the cloth beneath her hand. “Hold it still.”

“Okay.”

“Let me drive you to a doctor,” he said. “Or home. I’ll drive you home.”

She shook her head. “You can't drive, and I can’t go home,” she said, her voice rising in pitch, tinged with worry. “He’ll go to the pub, have another drink, and then _he’ll_ be going home…”

His mind reeled. He was on alert, suddenly worried that the man might return. He was still wondering who the guy was; he honestly didn’t know up from down at this point. “I didn’t know you had another boyfriend,” he blurted out.

Julia bristled. “Another _what_?”

John jabbed a thumb down the street. “That fuckin’ maniac—”

“Is _not_ my boyfriend,” Julia cut him off. “Jesus…‘e’s a just drunk and that’s all you need to know, Lennon. _Fuckin_ ’ all!”

She looked hurt, wounded, by the suggestion that she was intimately involved with the man he’d seen her with. John swallowed against a lump in his throat. “I would’ve beat the bastard to a pulp if you hadn’t stopped me! Who the fuck is he?”

Julia shook her head, anger in her eyes. “Me stepdad,” she said with a sigh.

She stooped to retrieve her bag, hands still shaking, and as she knelt she noticed a tear in her stockings, causing her to curse under her breath, as though _that_ were the lowest point of her evening.

John crossed his arms over his chest, remembering a long ago conversation, the intimations of abuse. The pieces began to click into place. “Yer stepdad?”

She shook her head and stood to her full height. “Yeah, all right? There you go. You just met the only branch left on my family tree,” she said, lifting a hand to motion to her face. “Drink it in, John! Dick’s handiwork. He’s getting quite good at it. I have such a nice collection of bruises from him—that’s about all ‘e gives me these days. Did you want to see those too?” Using her free hand, she pulled down the torn collar of her shirt even further, exposing old, yellowed bruises extending along the tops of her breasts. “Kind of boot-shaped, isn’t it? That’s what happens when you break Dick Owens’ curfew. And this?” She shrugged off John’s leather jacket and rolled up the sleeve of her bloodstained cardigan, revealing finger marks circling her forearm. “This was why I couldn’t make your show in New Brighton yesterday. I tried to take the car— _my_ car, John! This is _my fuckin’ car!_ —but he caught me before I could get out the door. That’s where this came from, too,” her voice shook as she pointed to her eye, the skin smudged and inky around her orbital bone.

John didn’t know what to say, what to do. He drawled the first word to tumble from his lips, not because he didn’t believe her, but because he didn’t _want_ to believe her. 

“Bullshit.” 

“Fuck you.”

She was trembling with rage; even in the half-shadows of that cold street, he could see it. John had never before wanted to hold someone, to comfort someone, to protect someone as badly as he did in that moment.

“Are you gonna tell Paul?”

She stared at him blankly for a long moment before shrugging, her eyes filling with tears. “What good will telling him this do?”

John wanted to say that any man worth having would want to know, would take it upon himself to make sure it never happened again, and that if Paul couldn’t do it on his own he’d have an army of men ready to back him up if it ever came to that. But he honestly wondered if that were true. He didn’t know if Paul would stand up to anyone, even over something like this; he’d certainly never seen it. The man had never had to fight for anything like this in his life; surely he’d take one look at the mess of a situation she was in and decide it was too much work for too little payoff… wouldn’t he?

Before he’d had a chance to say anything to her, he heard his name, and saw his bandmates—Paul, George, and Pete—and Cynthia rounding the corner and heading their way.

At first Paul was ecstatic to see Julia, but as soon as he saw her ripped shirt and the blood on her hands, his face turned ashen. “Jesus!”

Julia smiled, and for a moment John almost believed her. “It’s fine, Paul,” she said. “I’m having the clumsiest of nights.”

“What happened?”

She gulped and began talking. “I was parkin’ my car when I saw John, and in my hurry to get his attention, I-I snagged my shirt and gashed my face on the edge of the door here,” she said, pointing to the still-open car door. 

Even though he’d seen what really happened with his own eyes, John could almost believe the lie, such was the ease with which she said it. John marvelled at the front she put up; instinctively, he covered the switchblade on the sidewalk with the sole of his boot.

Paul stepped forward and took Julia into his arms. “You need to see a doctor,” he said. “Let me take you.”

“No, don’t be silly. You have another set to go, don’t you?” she asked. “I’ll drive myself.”

“Nonsense,” Cynthia chimed in, stepping into the middle of the circle that had formed on the sidewalk. “I’ll drive you.”

John nodded. “That’s a good idea,” he said.

“It is?” both Paul and Julia asked in unison. 

Cynthia stepped forward and gently took Julia’s hand away from her face, examining the cut. “Well, I’m sure it’ll scar, but I don’t know if you need stitches. I could clean it up for you.”

Julia shrugged. “I don’t have cleaning supplies at home.”

John observed his girlfriend taking in the telltale signs of abuse written on Julia’s body. She understood everything. “Well, I do,” Cynthia smiled. “Come on. You’ll stay with me tonight.”

Paul nodded, nervous, and grasped Julia’s hand. “You sure you’re okay?” he asked.

She nodded. “Fine, Paul. Just fine.”

He took her at her word. As Cynthia climbed into the driver’s seat, Paul walked Julia around the car; in front of everyone, he kissed her good night. She turned then, a shallow smile etched on her face, and caught John’s eyes. The look she shot him—at once grateful and pleading—sent shivers up his spine. He nodded, just slightly, and she seemed to relax, satisfied that he understood her meaning: he would keep her secret.

Within moments, the white Citroën was cruising away down the street.

“Was it just me,” Pete asked. “Or did she have a black eye?”

The other three men left on the street were silent for a moment until John spoke up. “Don’t be daft,” he said.

“Yeah,” Paul chimed in, eager to erase what he’d obviously seen, or to imbue it with with a more palatable explanation. “That was probably just makeup. Smudged, you know. From the rain.”

Pete shrugged. “I’m just sayin’ is all.”

John shook his head. “Do we have time for a pint?” he asked, quick to change the subject. The other three nodded in agreement, and they set off for The Grapes just around the corner.

As they walked, John flexed his hand, sore from the one punch he’d landed only a handful of minutes earlier. He noticed Paul noticing him, but he didn’t care; his mind wandered to Julia, body battered by an ugly hand… 

* * *

JOHN: I guess that was the last straw, because she finally moved out. It all happened rather fast, if I remember. I think she was already set up in her own place by the time we came back from London, from the Decca audition…

* * *

PAUL: I saw the same bruises John did but I just accepted her explanations—that she had fallen off a ladder or walked into a door. She was always on about how clumsy she was; I never questioned it. It wasn’t the way we did things back then. Private was private, and public was public, and even then, it wasn’t always your place to get involved. You generally kept to yourself. We all did. That's just how it was done.

* * *

WILSON: Did you ever tell anyone what really happened?

JOHN: Not a soul. ( _Pause_ ) Cyn figured it out, but I never told Paul. Not immediately, anyway.

WILSON: Why not?

JOHN: Because I saw with my own eyes what went on at home. I saw the way he kissed her. And she had begged me not to reveal that. ( _Pause_ ) I never realized until that night just how alone she was. She had no one, aside from us. Her trust in me… that was a big deal. I didn’t want to fuck that up.


	12. A Big Crowd

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: ["Moovin' N Groovin'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lqFlxMiMfE)"/["Rip it Up"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc_F3PaYgl0)

* * *

 PAUL: She moved up to West Derby—a block over from the Best’s house—and for a while we didn’t see each other. Really, I had pretty much given up on ever having anything more than a casual friendship with her at that point. We got very busy very quick—that disappointing Decca audition in London was just the ironic start of what turned out to be a very big year for us. So all of that kept me occupied. ( _Pause_ ) Seems callous, I know, but… you don't invest your money where you won't see returns, do you?

MURPHY: So you were no longer in pursuit of Julia?

PAUL: Not like before. It was too frustrating, and she was too closed off for my taste. But that all changed by the end of February.

* * *

JOHN: For us, a week without hearing from someone... why would that have alarmed us?

WILSON: Not even after what you'd seen at Christmas?

JOHN: Yeah, But it did for Cyn…

* * *

 

18 February 1962

Casbah Coffee Club

Mona doled out their earnings for the night and deposited the rest into the cash box, to be sorted later.

“That was a good night,” she smiled, picking up the box and giving it a rattle.

John downed the rest of the Coke in the bottle in front of him. “Big crowd,” he said.

Mona winked at him. “You lot always draw the biggest crowds.”

"Maybe we should stop advertisin' Paulie's striptease," George chimed in.

"We put up a lot of posters, son," John countered. "It'll take days to take 'em all down. 'Ey Paul?"

Paul, seated at John’s right at the small table in front of the canteen, and he hadn't heard a word that John or George had said. He was making eyes at Dot, as they’d been doing all night. _No, all month,_ John thought. Ever since Julia had stopped coming to their shows.

He was partly relieved that things seemed to have ended between Paul and Julia—her presence always meant that Paul, or John, or both, were distracted beyond the point of reason. But it hadn’t been pretty to watch it happen: Julia showing up to performances only to be met by Dot, gussied up and dripping from Paul’s arm. It didn’t take long for Julia to get the picture, to realize she was being rejected; from the beginning of February, her visits with them trickled down to virtually nothing. John figured he hadn’t seen Julia in at least a week, maybe more. To know that she had been spurned, heartlessly, by the man making such a show of things with Dot rankled John incessantly.

 _Julia deserved better_ , John thought. Whether John hated the googly-eyed act itself or the fact that it always worked so well for Paul, he couldn’t say. All he knew was that the public display beside him was making his stomach turn. 

He wished Cyn would show up so he could have an excuse to go home.

“I’ve got a few nights in March that are yours if you want ‘em,” Mona said. 

“You'll 'ave to run it by Eppy,” George piped up. 

“That man doesn’t like me,” she said matter-of-factly. 

“Well, do you want us or not?” John drawled.

Mona narrowed her eyes at John and then broke into a laugh that followed her up and out the back door of the club, leaving them with the place to themselves.

“Not bad,” George said as he pocketed his money. 

Pete poked his head in from around the corner. “You up for a pint?”

Paul and Dot got to their feet in enthusiastic agreement. John shook his head. 

“Aw, come on la’,” Paul prodded.

“I’ll wait for Cyn,” John said. “You go on.”  


As soon as the words left his mouth, the door to the club opened again. Cynthia stepped around the corner seconds later, her face set.

“Are yer ears burning?” George asked. 

Cynthia half-smiled but clearly wasn’t paying attention. “Was Julia here tonight?”

The mention of her name got Paul’s attention, and Dot stiffened, visibly, at his side. “No,” he said. “Why?”

Cynthia shook her head. “No one’s seen ‘er in a week. The lady she’s rentin’ from said she took a phone call at the house last Saturday and that was the last she saw ‘er.”

John blinked a few times, trying to make sense of things. It wasn’t like Cyn to be worried like this. She met his gaze, fear in her eyes; John knew then, without a shadow of a doubt, that his girlfriend knew Julia’s whole, sordid story. Now, his mind went to that dark place he hadn’t allowed it to go to since that night with Stu in Gambier Terrace. He worried and wondered, silently, about the kinds of things that could have happened, pictured them happening; with the template of Dick's assault still fresh in his mind's eye, it wasn't that hard to imagine.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Cyn said, as much for his benefit as for her own, to cover the insinuations she’d laid out for them so no one else would worry. But the way she was wringing her hands in front of her, the tone in her voice, were not lost on him. 

“I ‘avent’ seen ‘er in a while. Come to think of it, it's been a _long_ while," Paul said, turning to John, breaking his concentration. "Have you?”

“No,” John said.

“Well, I’m sure she’ll turn up,” Dot said, trying and failing to sound supportive. She clung to Paul’s arm; if she’d gotten any closer, they would have been wearing the same clothes.

“Right,” Cyn said, taking the bait anyway and flashing a weak smile. “I’m sure you’re right.”

Paul caught John’s eye at that moment, but neither of them said anything. John nodded. “She’s right. Julia’s a big girl. Maybe she went on holiday.”

“You don’t think she would have told us?”

_She wouldn’t have told you, that’s for sure,_ John thought. _Not with the way you’ve been carrying on…_

“Let it go, Paul,” Dot urged.

“It’s fine, Macca,” John said.

His words were like magic, a balm over the canker; George stood up from his chair, clapped his hands together, and asked where they were off to. Pete made a few suggestions nearby, and Paul eventually joined in with a few suggestions of his own. Through it all, Cynthia stood motionless, lines of worry still etched on her face. As the rest of them left the cellar, eventually only John and Cynthia remained.

"Let's go get a pint," he said, stepping towards his girlfriend and wrapping an arm around her waist. He pulled her toward him until they were touching, pelvis to pelvis. "I've got money burnin' a hole in my pocket... could get you nice and liquored up at Ye Cracke..."

Cynthia pushed him away. "John, I'm serious," he said. "You're not worried about Julia?"

John felt like he'd been dunked in ice water. He stepped back and shoved his hands in his pockets. "Well I fuckin' wasn't until you came in 'ere."

She sighed, and turned it into two big, deep breaths. "I am worried. Very worried. What if something happened?" 

“You’re making a bigger deal out of this than there has to be,” John said finally.

“Maybe,” she said. “But what if I’m not?”

“What are you talking about?” he asked. "What could  _possibly_ have happened to Julia Fitzpatrick here?"

She levelled her gaze at him. “I _know_ you know what I’m talking about.”

John looked down at his feet, expecting to see his stomach, bottomed out and laying in a pool between his toes. “So?" he asked, his voice strangled. He cleared his throat. "As far as I know she hasn’t seen the guy since December.”

“Maybe he found her,” Cyn said. “He always told her he would, you know.”

John stepped forward and took Cyn by the shoulders. “He’s a drunk. A fall down, stumblin’, no good fuckwit of a drunk, and if he hasn’t already drank himself into a cirrhotic liver or the path of a movin' vehicle, then it’s only a matter of time.”

Cynthia wasn’t comforted; she folded her arms across her chest. “She hates him. And he’s a dangerous guy. From everything she told me, I don’t know what he’s capable of…”

John remembered the scene in Temple Court, the knife, the blood, with a shudder. “I know,” he said, kissing the top of Cynthia’s head.

“I _know_ you know,” she whispered, repeating herself.  


“So what do you want me to do about it?” he asked. 

Cyn sighed. “That's the thing," she said. "I have no idea."

John kissed her again, and for a long moment neither of them said a word.

“Do you want to go get a drink?” she asked finally.

He bent his head and nuzzled her neck, “Not really,” he growled, his lips finding purchase along her jaw.

She giggled. “John Winston Lennon—”

He nipped at her earlobe, and she let him push her back and across the small table in front of the canteen, where they made love to forget it all.

* * *

PAUL: Of course I was worried, but worrying put me in conflict with Dot, and I didn’t need that, so I tried to force it from my mind. We had engagements, things to do. I thought she’d turn up and it would be fine. But then two days later, there she was again, on my doorstep, and it _wasn’t_ fine… ( _Pause_ ) it was so very far from fine...


	13. She Seemed to Him So Frail

* * *

 Chapter Soundtrack: ["Against the Sky"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUt0-JnOIdg) / ["Hands, Be Still"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVLp_igUBBc)

* * *

20 February 1962

Forthlin Road 

The Beatles sat exhausted inside Neil Aspinall’s van as it bumped and thudded along the road into Liverpool. They were returning, late in the evening, from their biggest engagement thus far: the Southport Floral Hall. It had been a real theatre, with real seats, and a curtain that opened and closed in front of them. Their fans had cheered, roared, stood up in their seats and refused to stop. It had been an unimaginable high. It seemed as if they were finally getting somewhere. To say they were overwhelmed would have been an understatement.

But they were tired. Excitedly exhausted. 

To break the deafening silence that filled the cab, John began to speak:

“Where are we goin’, fellas?” 

The other men woke up in their seats,startled to cognition by the sudden intrusion into the quietude of the drive thus far. Pete turned to George, and George smiled at Paul. They all chorused: “To the top, Johnny.”

“And where’s that?” John said through a half-concealed yawn.

“To the toppermost of the poppermost!” the three of them exclaimed loudly, slapping high fives and whooping in their seats. It was a reaction that they’d deserved to have, and which their exhaustion had prevented them from having until that moment. Paul looked at John, grinning like he was, and couldn't help but smile back.

"Since when did we appoint you Director of Morale?" Paul joked.

"Since the rest of you lot decided a kip was better'n a party."

Paul laughed. "This comin' from someone who'd sleep for a week if it was socially acceptable."

"Even if it's not, son," John winked.

Paul shook his head in wonderment. "What are we even doing here?" 

"Exactly what we should be doing," was John's reply. Like he didn't even have to think about it. 

Neil dropped Paul off last, and as he hauled himself out of the van and up the steps to his house, he didn’t notice the figure sitting on the stoop. It was dark; even with the porch light on, it was hard to make out features. But as he approached, he saw a pair of smart penny loafers perched on the step, and as his eyes travelled up and the form took on detail, recognition dawned.

“Julia?” he asked. 

She startled; a book fell from her lap. In the dim light, Paul saw her blink her eyes several times. She looked as if she’d been sleeping.

“Paul.”

Her voice was hoarse, raspy. As Paul approached he noticed other things: her eyes were sunken, as were her cheeks; she looked gaunt, her skin sallow and pale as death. She wasn’t wearing a coat and shivered beneath the thin cardigan covering her shoulders. Her pale legs, peeking out from the hem of her skirt, were covered in a patchwork of bruises and scrapes. A small wicker suitcase sat on the lowest step; pieces of fabric jutted out from inside where they’d been caught as the case was closed and locked, obviously in a hurry. The penny loafers, too, were scuffed and dirty. She looked frightful.

Stunned at the ghastly sight of her, Paul leaned over and offered to help her up. He barely felt her in his arms as he pulled her to her feet and threw his own jacket around her.

She looked up at him then, her hollow eyes reflecting nothing but the shine of the porchlight, and even that seemed dimmer than normal. She tried to smile but the creases and lines in her face made it look more like a painful grimace. The paper fine translucency of her skin couldn’t hide the story of violence written on her body: a swollen and busted lip, a blackened right eye, purple stains peeking out from the collar of her shirt where it clung to her collarbone. Paul wished he could look away.

“What happened to you, Julia?”

She licked her lips, curiously flicking the tip of her tongue over the welt there as if she hadn't noticed it before. “Can I come in?” she asked softly.

There wasn't any question that he would say yes. Paul escorted her to the door as quickly as he could with one hand and brought her inside, shutting and locking the door on the drafty February air.

“I’m sorry for barging in,” her voice was quiet, and even in the silence pervading the house, he struggled to hear her. “I-I didn’t know where else to go… .”

Paul switched on the overhead light and the full extent of her injuries became clear. To say he was taken aback would be a grave understatement. “Julia, seriously: what the hell happened?”

  
She stood there for a moment, wringing her dry, red, chapped hands in front of her, chewing her lower lip and breaking open one of the scabbed over cuts in the process. She finally shook her head. Her hair fell into her eyes and she lifted her arms then to brush it away, her hands shaking violently. “I just—”

On the underside of her white sleeve, Paul saw rust-coloured bloodstains, two large patches near her elbow, each roughly the size of an orange; the cuff of her other sleeve was similarly ringed in crimson. In a split second, his eyes moved down the side of her shirt to splatters along the bottom hem of the cardigan, and down further along the front of her tawny skirt. He struggled to keep his feet.

“You’re fuckin’ bleeding!”

Startled, she followed his gaze. “No…” she said, her voice vibrating as it rose in pitch.

In disbelief, Paul grabbed her arm. “Are you sure?”

Panicked, Julia wrenched her arm out of his grasp, surprising him with the sudden burst of strength. “No!” she cried. “I told you! It’s not mine.”

“Then whose is it?” 

She stared back at him. Her whole body was shaking, violently, tired eyes flashing, challenging him, until their edges began to blur. It only seemed to take a moment for the change to manifest, for Julia to realize her lashes were the only thing holding her tears back. Paul didn’t know what to do. He wished with everything in his being that he hadn’t yelled, hadn't grabbed her, that he would have acted a little less angrily, that she hadn’t chosen this moment to start crying. So he did what he thought was right and stepped forward, folding her into his arms, and the shaking torrent was unleashed. She felt so different against him; stiff, angular, even within the thick padding of his coat around her shuddering shoulders. There were no soft contours, no curves to hold onto. She was all sharp bone and vibrations. When she sobbed, her body shook so violently that Paul worried she’d break. He held on to her as tightly as he thought she could handle. 

In between sobs, she rambled on, her words and phrases disconnected from one another, sometimes in French, mostly incoherent. Paul couldn’t catch it all, but what he could make out was confusing and disturbing.

"I didn't know what to do... I didn't do it... I didn't know where to go..."

Her fingers clutched his shirt, pulling at him, as if she were trying to climb further into his arms than was humanly possible.

Paul’s fright at the uncomfortable turn of events nearly took over. “It’s all right… it’s all right,” he repeated to her, for himself as much as her benefit as he stroked her back, overwhelmed but trying his best to quiet her. He realized what an absurd lie it was; he had no idea what “it” was, or if it truly could be “all right.” But he had to say _something_.

It took several minutes before her sobs calmed enough for her to breathe normally again—great gulps of air pulled into her lungs and exhaled with such force she vocalized every sigh. Paul felt her heart beating against his chest through the desperately thin layers of fabric separating them. She gently released his shirt from her closed fists—fists, he’d noticed, that were covered in scrapes and cuts, lacerations whose source he didn’t want to know about. He stroked her hair and rested his cheek atop her head, feeling her breath warming his skin though the cotton of his t-shirt.

“I didn’t know where else to go,” she whispered.

“You already said that, love.”

Another deep inhale; another shaking sigh. “Can I stay here for a while?” she asked. “I’m just… I’m so tired. Just for a little while?”

She pleaded with him, swaying unsteadily on her feet, her drowsy eyes blinking ever more slowly. He took hold of her forearm to steady her. “You can stay here as long as you need to.”

She sniffled and blinked away her tears. “Thank you,” was her barely audible response.

She asked if she could take a bath and Paul didn’t see any good reason why not, so he led her to the bathroom, got her a towel, reminded her to keep the noise down until he remembered that his father and brother were away visiting his aunt—a lucky break. She sat on the edge of the toilet seat while he drew the bath water for her, and he made sure the door was sealed behind him as he left.

Then he telephoned John.

“Miss me already?” John interrupted as soon as he heard Paul’s voice.

“John, Jules just showed up on my doorstep, suitcase in tow, cryin’ and ramblin’ on about this and that… .”

“She’s there now?”

“She’s a bloody mess, John,” Paul started. “Literally. She’s just covered in blood.”

“Blood?”

“She asked me if she could stay here. I don’t know what to do.”

John was silent for a long while. He could hear him take a long drag of a cigarette on the other end before he finally answered. “Want me to come over?”

“Yes,” Paul said before adding: “Bring Cyn.”

John was silent, but he muttered something that sounded like agreement, and hung up the phone. Within what felt like hours but what was likely less than thirty minutes, John and Cynthia were on the McCartney doorstep.

“I still don’t know what she was on about,” Paul sighed as he opened the door for them. “None of it makes sense.”

“I wanna know where she was and who she was with,” John announced, his voice pitched in anger.

“She didn’t say anything of value in so many words, but from what I could piece together—”

“What did she say happened?”

“She didn’t. She was just rambling, you know how she does—”

John cleared his throat. “Well, I don’t know… do you think something bad happened?”

“Fuck me, John,” Paul’s eyes widened and his hand involuntarily shot out to gesture toward the stairs. “She didn’t beat the daylights out of herself, did she?!”

Cynthia put one hand on Paul’s shoulder and one on John’s. “You don’t know, so don’t start worrying about it,” she said, in a calm, even tone that relaxed Paul enough for him to stop pacing. 

“Right,” he said. “Right.” And he stood there for a moment, biting the skin around his thumbnail, before continuing. “I mean, she just showed up, and I didn’t know what to do, call the police or what, and—”

“Where is she?” Cynthia asked, exasperated with his fretting, wresting control from Paul’s weary hands.

He motioned again to the bathroom; Cynthia shrugged off her coat, rolled up the sleeves of her sweater, took her purse, and made her way through the house.

Paul continued to chew on his fingernail. John leaned against the wall, his arms folded in front of him, seemingly deep in thought.

“I’m sure there’s an explanation,” John replied. He stood for a moment longer before walking into the front room and helping himself to the armchair nearest the television; as he bent to sit down, he flicked the switch on the TV, and the room slowly began to illuminate in shades of the cold, electronic bluish-white of the screen. “If not,” he continued, setting his feet on the footrest, “then the absurdity of it all will make an amusing story to tell the grandkiddies.”

Paul tried to laugh, but the sound was strangled in his throat. He sat down in a chair beside John’s. They stared absently at the television for a long while until John reached out, awkwardly, and patted Paul’s shoulder. It was one of the tenderest shows of emotion to come from John in all the years Paul had known him; it almost sent him into a fit of crying himself.

They watched the BBC, the volume low, but neither of them paid attention. Like nervous fathers-to-be in a hospital waiting room, they bounced their knees in anticipation, listening for the sounds from the bathroom to travel to them, hoping to hear something, always on alert. Paul chewed his thumbnail until he tasted blood. 

Half an hour passed with no sound other than those emanating from the TV; then, blessedly, a creak. It was Paul’s own bedroom door closing—Paul knew the sound well—followed by Cynthia’s soft footsteps as she descended the stairs.

“Before you ask…” Cynthia said as she came into view. “She’s not the one who was bleeding. That blood wasn’t hers.”

“Did she tell you anything?” Paul asked Cynthia.

She sat down on the arm of the chair in which John was seated. “She said she fell. That’s all she’d tell me,” Cynthia paused, cocking her head to the side, a clear indication that she was wise to the lie. “That, and she’s asking for you, Paul.”

John snapped his head around to look at Paul; if he hadn’t known any better, Paul might have thought John looked disappointed, crestfallen. Time dilated the room: Paul saw the concern in John’s eyes, mirrored in his own; he saw his shoulders sag as if the breath had been sucked out of him. Concern turned to a flash of anger, there across his pupils, making them spark; the outer edges of his irises seemed to harden. Behind his glasses, John blazed. All this he saw as if he were watching the scene unfold from outside of himself. 

Paul blinked; when he opened his eyes again, John was turned back to the TV. He made the best show of shaking off the odd feeling and stood up. “Ta Cyn," he said, his voice shaking.

Cyn walked over to where Paul was standing, dropping her voice to a whisper. “Her clothes. They’re ruined. I could try and scrub out the stains but I might wear through the material before any of it came out.”

“All that blood…”

Cynthia shook her head. “I don’t know where it came from, but it wasn’t her.”

Paul nodded, knowing his face was blank. 

“She came to you because she trusts you, Paul,” Cynthia said. “There are things that have happened, things you don’t know—”

Paul’s eyebrows shot up; he put a hand on Cyn’s arm. “Like what?”

Cyn shook her head. “It’s not my place,” she replied. “Julia will tell you when she’s ready. Until then, you’ve just got to remember to be kind. To be patient. She doesn’t need another angry bastard in ‘er life.”

_Another angry bastard?_ he wondered. _Who was the first?_

At a complete and total loss, he muttered another thanks before making his way to the stairs. When he gained the top floor and reached his bedroom, he pushed open the door; the wood groaned and sighed, announcing his entrance. 

Julia didn’t notice. She was sitting on his bed, her feet dangling over the edge, hands gripping the comforter; white-knuckled, she stared at the wall opposite her. She wore a plain white t-shirt—one of his own, he realized—and a pair of long underwear that Cyn had evidently found in a drawer. None of it fit, but it was better than the alternative: he saw Julia’s blood-stained clothes, folded on the floor away from the bed, with Julia’s bag next to it. 

_Be kind… be patient…_

Paul made his way to her side. “Julia?” he asked. 

“Hm?” she asked, looking up at him. For a fleeting moment, her face changed, softening as she smiled. "Paul," she sighed into the room. "You're here."

He sat down beside her on the bed, looking down at her hands, softened by the bath water and cleaned of most of the dirt and dried blood so that the cuts on her knuckles seemed tame, manageable, compared to what he’d seen before. Her hair fell in damp curtains around her shoulders, towel-dried as best they could be but still dropping water down the front of the shirt, rendering the thin garment see-through to the point of invisibility. Paul could see the faint outline of her breasts, yes, but he also saw the shapes and shadows of more bruises, some fading, some he was sure were newly formed. His stomach dropped to the floorboards and he swallowed past the lump in his throat. 

"Yes, I'm here."

She gripped the blanket in her hands. He reached over and gently placed his hand over hers, massaging her fingers. It took a long time, but eventually her grip loosened; she began to hold his fingers instead. 

“Cynthia said you wanted to see me?” 

“She brushed my hair for me,” Julia whispered.

“She did a fine job.”

Julia was silent for a long time. “Maybe if I hadn’t been wearing those clothes, or maybe if I’d kept wearing my glasses, he wouldn't have noticed me. Certainly if I’d kept my glasses…” 

Angry, confused, Paul clenched his teeth until his jaw burned. “You’re not making any sense, love.”

She stared up at him. The wild, crazed look in her eyes was frightening; he was infinitely thankful when she closed them and began to mutter to herself: “I’m a _good girl_ ,” she repeated to herself. Tears pushed out of her closed lids, crept through her lashes. “You hardly talked to me before. All those years ago. Why didn’t you notice me? I’m a good girl, aren’t I? Don't you like good girls?”

Paul shook his head in bewildered silence, reaching over to smooth her damp hair away from her face.

“You never talked to me,” she whispered. “John talked to me. John asked me out. You didn’t even know who I was. But I wanted men to like me. I wanted men to _want_ me. Men don’t want you unless you dress like that.”

“John asked you out?” Paul asked. “When?”

“Ancient history, ancient history… _l’histoire ancienne_ ,” she murmured, adding, in a voice flat and devoid of emotion: “Don’t worry, I turned him down.” 

Paul shook his head, pushing aside the tangent onto which she had drifted and returning to the original question. “You were a kid, Julia. I think I probably still thought girls had cooties, you know?” It was a lame lie, played off as a joke. Still, he shrugged. “It was different. I was different.”

“But you want your girls to look like Bardot…”

“C’mon,” he disengaged, standing up in front of her and gesturing for her to do the same. He hooked his hand beneath her arm and helped her stand, shakily, at his side. WIth his other hand, he pulled back the covers on his bed and helped her to crawl in and shift over until she was resting her head on his pillow. He tucked the blankets up under her chin. 

“Beautiful,” she murmured, her fingers on her face. “Beautiful girl… my father used to tell me I was a beautiful girl.”

Paul sat on the edge of the bed, stroking her hair and her bath water-softened cheek, careful to avoid the darkened and angry smudges lining her orbital bone. “You still are beautiful.”

She lay there in silence for a long while. “Can you read to me?” she asked finally. “Just a little?”

Paul nodded. “What book?”

She pointed to her bag. “There, on top.”

Paul reached over to grab it. It was the small book she’d had with her since Paris, the one she’d inherited from her father: his dog-eared copy of _Dubliners._

“I’ve never read this before,” he said. 

Julia slid over on the narrow bed and Paul sat down beside her, against the headboard, his feet up on the mattress and crossed at the ankles; he flipped the book open to where the bookmark was. It was halfway through a story. Paul flipped the pages back.

"What's happened so far?"

"There's a party..." Julia whispered. "Everyone is there. All of Gabriel's family and friends. His wife." She sighed. "She's sad. He's a snob."

"Is that so?" Paul asked.

 

She nodded; he felt it against his shoulder. Upon lifting his arm, Julia snuggled against his body, wrapping a pale, bruised arm around his midsection, resting her gaunt cheek against his chest. He felt her damp hair soaking through his shirt, but he didn’t mind. It was the closest they’d been in a long time; even though Paul had imagined their first moment of intimacy after such a long absence being so different, he relished this. He wanted her there, pressed to his side, in the warmth and sacred stillness of his family home.

"Here?" he asked softly, pointing with his finger at the page.

"Okay," Julia replied.

So Paul began to read:

“ _‘He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. ‘Distant Music’ he would call the picture if he were a painter.’_ ”

“This is my favourite part,” she whispered.

And as he read, she read along with him, whispering some of the words from memory while Paul read them from the page, illuminated by the narrowest shafts of moonlight coming through the window. He turned the pages quietly, trying to keep the flow; he’d never read anything by Joyce, or if he had he didn’t remember it. But as he read to Julia, the story grew inside of him, took form; he could see the characters, walking down a darkened Dublin street; desperate, tragic characters in the midst of a crisis they didn’t know was already surrounding them.

Paul listened as Julia’s breathing grew deeper and more rhythmic, as her eyes closed, as she stopped reciting the words on the page under Paul’s hand. When he was certain she had fallen asleep, he carefully moved her, placing her head on his pillow, and dared to place a soft kiss on her temple.

John stood in the doorway. His unexpected presence alarmed Paul; he felt his heartbeat quicken and then subside as he realized who it was.

“If ye keep goin’ around like that, scarin’ people… .”

“Read that last part again,” John said.

“Beg pardon?”

“The last thing you just read.”

Paul paused, looking at John and then at the softly worn book in his hands. With a small shrug, he thumbed the pages, scanning for where he’d left Gabriel and Gretta Conroy. He quietly cleared his throat: “‘ _She was walking on before him so lightly and so erect that he longed to run after her noiselessly, catch her by the shoulders and say something foolish and affectionate into her ear. She seemed to him so frail that he longed to defend her against something and then to be alone with her…_ .’”

Paul slowed down, his tongue growing thick within his mouth. His eyes moved over the words again as soon as he’d read them, and as he drank it in, he felt a sudden surge of strong tenderness wash over him. He glanced down at Julia, sleeping, with the blankets tucked up under her chin, the line of that scar glinting in the light of the moon. She seemed to him so frail… .

Then Paul looked at John. He, too, fixed his gaze on Julia’s face. He didn’t blink; he didn’t seem to breathe, and when he did, he shuddered with the force of it as the air rushed into his lungs. When he finally blinked, John transferred his attention to Paul. For a long moment, the two men locked eyes; neither of them moved nor dared to speak a word. 

Finally, John quietly cleared his throat, lowered his head, and stepped out of the room, and for the second time that night, Paul had the distinct impression that he was not the only one in love with Julia Fitzpatrick.

* * *

PAUL: It's a beautifully-written story, "The Dead", truly.

MURPHY: She's got this other lover, right? From her past?

PAUL: Right. It ends on that: Gabriel and Gretta at this hotel, alone for the first time in a long time, and he wants sex. It's all he can think of. But she's been reminded about this whole other past that he has no idea about. From before he knew her, when she was a girl in Galway. When she had a lover, someone who died after she rejected him. ( _Pause_ ) Gretta is his whole world, but Gabriel just a piece of hers. He's smart and charming, but he's nothing because she doesn't feel about him the way he thought she did. And she's so sad. So sad. ( _Pause_ ) It ends with Gretta crying herself to sleep and Gabriel looking out over the snow falling outside. It's so sad. I've read it a hundred times since then, and every time I read it, I'm struck by how poignant it is. It's really a beautiful story. But it's so sad...

MURPHY: Does she love him more than Gabriel?  
  
PAUL: Hard to say. Differently, maybe. Not a question of degree.

MURPHY: And is that how you had first come to understand how Julia felt towards John?  


PAUL: ( _Pause_ ) I was terrified for her. Terrified _of_ her. I had no idea what had happened. But it seemed as though John did. He knew more than I did, certainly. That rankled. She trusted me, certainly, otherwise she wouldn't have come to my door. But she couldn't tell me what had happened, what was happening. That, she saved for John.   


MURPHY: Different. Not a question of degree.

PAUL: Yes, exactly...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Full text of James Joyce's "The Dead": https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/joyce/james/j8d/chapter15.html


	14. You Tell Me Things I Want To Know

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: ["Hippy Hippy Shake"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sV-_kZW1V8) /  ["Ask Me Why"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unnCU1JeGkA) / ["Bedroom Window"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDDfzKj9aCo)

* * *

 PAUL: Jules seemed to be afraid of something—people, or crowds, I never figured it out—because for a while—at least a few weeks, long after the bruises faded away—she refused to go out, to be around people. She just holed up in her bedsit, out in West Derby, taking meals cooked by her landlady up in her room by herself. ( _Pause_ ) Oh, sure, once in a while she would go, with me, for a walk maybe or to grab a bite to eat. But until the spring, I honestly didn’t know where I stood with her. She wouldn’t let me touch her but when I took her out anywhere, I got to hold her hand. I guess at the time that was enough.

MURPHY: Paul, I have to ask: why did you hang around? I mean, for all this time, this girl has been a complete tease, and you’re a young man in your prime, with a willing girlfriend sticking it out beside you…

PAUL: Well I _did_ like her. And she seemed to need someone. Cyn really got in my head with all that talk about things I didn’t know. I wanted to get to the bottom of it, and at the same time I wanted to be good to her. I wanted to be good _for_ her. ( _Sigh_ ) But really, if I’m being honest, it was all because of John.

MURPHY: John?

PAUL: ( _Pause_ ) Seeing the way he had looked at her that night… I was nervous that maybe something was going on between them. I’m ashamed of it now, but it was all I could think about then—that John and Jules were secretly an item. I think that spurred me on as much as anything. The competition of it all…

* * *

7 April 1962

Casbah Coffee Club, 

8 Hayman’s Green, West Derby

From wall to wall in every room of the cramped cellar, people jostled for position. Up on the stage in the Spider Room, Paul could watch them all, every last one of them, jammed in there to send them off on another multi-week stint in Hamburg. More than any other place they’d played, this was the only club they truly felt was their own; they’d been there from the very first night and even before that, when Mona had first decided to turn her basement into a coffee club. Paul and John and George and Pete had painted the walls and ceilings, leaving their fingerprints—literally and figuratively—all over the series of interconnected rooms that served as one of the best live music venues in Liverpool. These were their people, paying hard earned membership dues to watch them perform. Paul loved every minute.

On this night, as their set wound down, he scanned the sea of heads for the one person he wanted to see more than anyone. She wasn’t hard to spot; even without her newly bleached hair styled higher than any other girl’s in the room—all of that, from the bleaching to the styling, he knew was helped by Cyn’s hand—Julia stood out in her regular spot, just to the right of the stage, as if the last few months had never happened. She wore a vibrant purple sweater—a new one, Paul noticed, a bright and cheerful addition to a wardrobe previously swimming in mutable monochrome—that fit her eagerly in all the right places, her pale legs peeking out from underneath the hem of a white pencil skirt. The scarf he’d bought for her in Paris was tied around the crown of her head, fashioned into a complimentary headscarf, an unusual addition to the wardrobe but one that only served to make her stand out more, setting her apart from the other, plainer girls milling about the room. 

And whatever her reasons for the change in wardrobe, it had caught his eye. Sweating and energized, as soon as the set was over, Paul moved through the crowd and made his way to her side.

Julia leaned back against the wall, her hands clasped in the small of her back. She was chewing a hole through her bottom lip.

“Your hair,” Paul grinned.

“You like it?” she asked.

He touched a tendril that had deliberately been left out of the styling. “It looks great. Really great.”

She blushed. “It’s been a while since I ‘eard you play. You sound amazing.”  


“You really think so?” Paul asked. He knew the answer; he wasn’t deaf, and their reputation as one of the best groups in Liverpool hadn’t been lost on him. But having validation from her fed his ego. He was always eager for more.

She nodded. “I think you’ll do wonderfully in Hamburg.”

Paul couldn’t contain himself or his grin, and as the records started playing and couples around them started shuffling and dancing again in the cramped quarters, he tried to get her to join in. She, in turn, grinned and let him hold her, intimately close—Paul’s hand whispering across her lower back, her breasts pressed to his chest.

“ _When we’re at the dances, I fancy me chances_ …” he sang, leaning over and pressing a kiss to Julia’s cheek, just barely above the fresh, shiny, pink scar along her jaw that glinted in the dim light of the room. For a moment, she stiffened, losing her smile, and Paul pulled back almost as soon as he’d touched her.

“I’m sorry.”

She shook her head but couldn’t dislodge the look in her eyes. “It’s nothing,” she tried to smile. After a moment, she had relaxed again.

Paul pushed past his discomfort, ignoring what had happened, exactly the same way he’d done it every other time he’d pressed his advantage and been quietly rebuffed. It was a familiar song-and-dance, one which he knew intimately and which he wouldn’t have put up with, he knew, for most any other girls.

But for Julia, he knew, he would do much more. His feelings had grown tenfold, especially since the frightening experience in late February, which she had yet to talk about in spite of the obvious and lasting effects it had had on her. He had tried to spend as much time as possible with her during the weeks the followed, sandwiched between that awful moment on his front stoop and now, huddled under a doorjamb in the Mona Best’s basement. Tenderness he never expected to feel replaced the frustration that had enveloped him for months at the lack of movement and progression in their relationship; it wasn’t that he didn’t care, it was more like he cared about _more_ than just that. Paul liked to imagine that it was part of his maturation. He felt worldly, grown up.

But really, more than anything, he knew that the reason he stayed close, why he’d been so affectionate despite the obvious signs that she was less than enthusiastic in returning it, was that he’d glimpsed the same tenderness from another.

John’s increased presence in Julia’s life, on account of Cynthia and Julia’s growing friendship, was more than a passing factor in Paul’s decision to focus his attentions. The thought of losing Julia, especially to John, set Paul’s competitive nature going. He knew the risks; he wouldn’t just be losing Julia, but he’d lose John as well, and that would be the end of the band, because there was no way he could share a stage with someone who’d nicked his girl while he wasn’t paying attention.

So he accepted the push back from Julia and played things conservatively, settling for the hand-holding and not expecting anything more. He knew she’d come around, eventually; for now, his job was simple.

_Be kind. Be patient_. 

As the night drew on and the crowd thinned, Julia stayed tight to Paul’s side, her nervous energy coming out whenever anyone squeezed past them or maneuvered their way into a conversation with him, coming too close to her and invading the personal space she’d spent the last six weeks building up around herself. A few times, he felt her small hand slip into his, and he would squeeze her fingers gently while carrying on with whoever was in front of him, just to let her know he knew she was there, that he wasn’t leaving, that she was safe at his side.

There were still a hundred people or more drinking and smoking, in the cellar and in the backyard, when Julia finally yawned and rested her head on Paul’s shoulder. “I’m going to turn in,” she said. “I’m exhausted.”

“Let me walk you home?” Paul asked.

Julia nodded, and with her hand in his, she let him lead her through the crowd and out into the early spring air, around the house to the front street, down the darkened walks toward the back entrance to the home she lived in—an upstairs back bedroom in a ramshackle home owned by a widow, less than a two minutes’ walk from the Casbah.

Usually, the night would have ended there, but with a crooked and devilish half smile, Julia cocked her head toward her door and ushered Paul inside; for the first time in months, Paul’s hopes pitched forward and churned in his stomach, sending shockwaves pulsing to every nerve ending in his body.

“Quiet,” she urged. “The old lady’s got ears like nobody’s business…”

She flicked on the light and Paul, for the first time, saw the space that Julia was calling home. He was suddenly and acutely aware of how tiny a life Julia led: her things took up less than half the space in the admittedly small room she inhabited. There was a tiny dresser with Julia’s wicker suitcase next to it. Her narrow bed took up the corner beneath the only window, which looked out into the trees on the front street. Beside her bed was a three-legged night table, a lamp on top of that, and beneath it on the floor were two bottles of Scotch and four glass tumblers. 

Apart from a calendar hanging on the wall beside the door, there was only one personal touch that she’d allowed for decoration: a small photo collage tacked to the wall, spanning the late autumn and early winter of 1961, made up mostly of photos of John and Paul at their midnight meetings.

His desire was numbed, locked away for now. He suddenly wanted nothing more than to leave her, unmolested by his baser urges, and to slink back home by himself. All it would take, he knew, was for her to hold his hand again and he’d be a goner; at least it was manageable, as long as she stayed on the other side of the room.

“You’re a mystery to me, Fitzpatrick,” Paul said as he thumbed one of those photographs, losing his edge and relaxing into the soles of his shoes. His finger stopped on a solitary photo, sepia toned instead of starkly black and white, and standing out as a result. “Is this yer mum?”

Julia flopped down onto her bed and leaned over to grab a glass; the old mattress squealed and groaned in protest. “Yeah,” she muttered. “Hannah Fitzpatrick. The one and only.” She lifted an empty tumbler. “Did you want a drink?”

He shook his head.

“Mind if I have one?”

Paul furrowed his brow and turned to face her. “Jules,” he opened his mouth to continue, intending to ask her a zillion other questions— _Where did you disappear to in February? What happened to you—really—when you were gone? Where’s your stepdad?—_ not the one that eventually tumbled from his lips. 

“Are you sleeping with John?”

She looked at him for a moment, her eyes wide, and then broke into a laugh the likes of which he hadn’t heard in a very long time. “ _John_?!” she cried. “John _Lennon_? Am I _sleeping_ with _John Lennon_?”  


He hadn’t thought it was such a strange question. He lowered his eyes and counted the knots in the wood under his feet.

“What would make you ask that?”

“I dunno,” he shrugged. “I guess… what with you acting the way you’ve been lately.”

“What do you mean?”

He knew he’d opened a proverbial Pandora’s box, but it was out there, and he was unable to reel it back. “I don’t mean—well, I guess what I’m saying is—”

“You’re angry with me?” she asked.

“What?”

“Are you angry with me?” she seemed to plead with him for answers. “Because I know I can be difficult at times, but I’m really just trying to make sense of a lot of things and I couldn’t stand it if you were angry with me—”

Paul looked up and saw her, staring at him, her eyes wide and framed by impossibly black, thickly-painted lashes. She seemed frantic, desperate. Wishing to avoid upsetting her, Paul quickly gained his feet and walked across the small room in three strides, coming to sit with her on the bed.  


“Of course I’m happy. What would make you think otherwise?”

“I’m not affectionate like other girls,” she said. “I _know_ I’m difficult. It’s just—”

Paul was not ready to have this conversation. He shook his head. “Julia, it’s fine. Really. We’re just starting out. Sort of. And it’s normal.”

“I don’t want you to get bored with me and chuck me.”

“Chuck you?” Paul stifled a laugh. “Why in the _world_ would I want to chuck—” 

But before he could finish his thought, Julia had reached across him and stuck her hand down the front of his trousers.

“Ohh!” Paul cried, recoiling in shock. But Julia’s hand had found the length of him and he felt himself responding accordingly, his barely concealed desire springing forth just as he suspected it would. “Jules, what the bloody—”

With her other hand, she pressed a finger to his lips, silencing him. “Take ‘em off,” she instructed. Paul did as he was told, undoing his belt and unbuttoning his jeans. She pushed him back on the bed, and as he maneuvered to get into a better position, she straddled him.

“Jesus Julia—” Paul began, “I mean—can’t we—start off a bit—?”

But she pressed her hand again to his lips, cutting off his words. “No kissing,” she said, beating him to the punch. “That’s rule number one.”

_There are rules?_ Paul thought, but his mind was stalled as Julia began to pump her hand, giving a little twist at the end of each tortuous stroke. Paul let his eyes close as he let out a groan, muffled against Julia’s palm.

“Rule number two,” she said, “Keep your eyes closed.”

_Jesus,_ he thought. But he didn’t disobey.

“And number three?” she gave a twist, and Paul cried out again, “Don’t touch me.”

She stroked him slowly, taking long, careful pulls from base to tip; Paul felt ready to explode.

“I won’t continue until you agree.”

Paul would have promised her the Taj Mahal if she’d asked for it. Julia began to squeeze her fingers closed around him. With a barely concealed groan, he answered “Yes” into the warmth of her hand pressed against his lips, and Julia finished him off.

When it was over, Julia got up to wash, tiptoeing to the bathroom down the hall to do so; Paul embarrassingly wiped himself clean with a t-shirt she tossed to him from the end of the bed. He lay back against the pillows, staring up at the ceiling above his head, feeling the blood in his cheeks radiating heat. His breathing returned to normal but his mind swam. _What had just happened?_ No, that part was obvious. _Why had it happened?_ _What was she thinking? How had she come up with those rules?_

None of the answers he’d come up with were satisfying in the least. 

He finally saw Julia striding towards him. She’d unpinned her hair and brushed out some of the stiffness of her hairspray; it tumbled around her face and down her shoulders like a halo of spun sugar. Her face was scrubbed—it was the first time since her younger teenage years that he’d seen her without makeup on, and he was struck by the change; there were her freckles, he noticed, and her eyes were less blue and more grey without a wash of eyeshadow across her lids. She’d splashed water on her purple sweater; halfway across the room, she peeled it off, revealing a thin, white, barely opaque dress shirt underneath. She rejoined him on the bed.

Once again, Paul’s eyebrows met above the bridge of his nose. “Julia… why did you—?”  


“It’s better not to ask too many questions,” she grinned, tapping the tip of his nose with her index finger. 

“But why?”

She shrugged—imperceptibly; Paul could only tell because her hair fell over her shoulder when she did it—and turned to face the kitchenette. She was silent for a long while. “Well,” she sighed. “Sometimes the answers are just—”

But she stopped suddenly, sitting back on the bed and crossing her legs underneath her as she grabbed a large section of her long hair and began to finger-smooth it into three smaller pieces, which she then began to braid. Mesmerized, Paul sat and watched her fingers criss-crossing the sections of hair over one another until she had worked her way down to the ends of her hair and secured it with a small hair tie. He was struck, instantly, by how childlike the whole thing seemed.

“What are you doing?” she asked him, drawing his attention as she stopped her hands, amusement on her tongue.

Paul shook his head. “It’s just… what you’re doing,” he told her. “I-I haven’t watched someone braid their hair since…”

He wanted to say since long before his mother died, but he held back. Julia smiled at him as she began to braid the other side; she knew what was he was going to say without him having to say it, anyway.

“Will you stay the night here? With me?” she asked suddenly. “No funny business. Just sleep.”

Paul knew his limits; the sight of Julia, her see-through shirt barely concealing the lacy bra and no girdle underneath, had caused Paul all sorts of erotic discomfort. His dick hurt, and he knew he’d be unable to have another go for at least a few hours. But staying there with her…

“Here?” he asked.

She giggled, flipping both plaited sections over her shoulders. “Where else would you sleep? In my car?”

He leaned back against the wall. “Well, I mean, after what we just did—”

Julia’s face became etched with worry. She drew in her bottom lip and began to chew. “Okay,” she shrugged. “I guess—”

“No,” Paul held out his hand to her. “If you want me to, I will.”

“I do,” she replied. “I mean, I would… like it, I mean… if you could stay.”

Paul nodded and climbed up on the bed again, positioning himself against the pillows. Julia smiled, reached up to the lamp beside the bed, and flicked it off, plunging the room into darkness. It took Paul’s eyes time to adjust to the pale slit of light coming from the window, street light and moonlight the only way to see at all. But he felt Julia snuggle down under the covers and press her body to his side, resting her head on his shoulder. He maneuvered his arm until he was holding her; his nostrils filled with the scent of her hairspray, softly floral and oddly chemical but wholly hers, all at once.

“Paul?”

“Mm?”

“This is nice, isn’t it?” she asked.

He chuckled. “What, this?” he asked. “I could definitely get used to it.”

“Good,” she nodded, pressing ever closer. “I mean, not every relationship _needs_ to be defined by sex, does it?”

He didn’t know how to respond. “Well, I suppose—”

He felt her shrug her shoulders beside him. “I think sex is just easier when you take the emotion out of it, you know?” she told him. “Like a handshake. A contract.”

Paul wasn’t sure if he could make heads or tails of what she was saying, but he listened intently, sure he was on the cusp of something important. He kept his mouth shut and waited for her to continue. When she didn’t, the silence became oppressive.

“What do you mean?” he asked finally.

Again, she shrugged. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Women are more than just virgins or whores, you know? But when it comes to sex, I can only be one at a time. I can’t be both.”

She wasn’t making any sense. Paul sighed. “I don’t think that’s true.”

“Oh but it is,” she replied. “Boys are fun. _You’re_ fun. But if I want you to like me—I mean, _really like me_ …” she trailed off. “Besides, I can only pretend to be a virgin, anyway.”

Paul felt like he’d grasped a thin thread of her meaning. He squeezed her shoulder. “I don’t care about that, you know.”

Julia chuckled. “You would if you knew.”

His stomach clenched. “Knew what?”

Again, her silence spoke volumes. Paul swallowed and tried to smooth out the edge that had settled into the conversation.

“Sex is a great thing,” he whispered. “I think, anyway.”

She shook her head. “No,” she replied, her voice faraway and dreamlike; he knew she was falling asleep. “Sex is ugly,” she giggled softly. “Reduce it to what it is—a transaction. You get what you want, and I get what I want. Everyone wins that way.”

Paul was incredulous, almost horrified. Lost for words, he kissed her hair.

“Don’t do that,” she hushed.

“Why not?” he whispered back. “What do you want from me, Jules?”

But before she could procure a reply, he felt her breathing slow down and even out, and he knew she had drifted off to sleep.

He slipped under the blanket, careful not to disturb her, and pulled the quilt up around her shoulders. Eyes adjusted, he watched her for a long moment: eyes closed, her lips set gently together in a soft line, lit by the moon, she looked angelic.

He slept fitfully and dreamed of orgies and blow jobs; but Julia settled against him, warm and easy, and let him hold her while she slept soundly for the first time in weeks.

* * *

PAUL: We were leaving in a few days, back for another month long stint in Hamburg. I just soaked up what I could from her, the attention. But it frightened me, all her talk about sex. Sure it was oddly liberating to know where she stood on the subject. So I never pushed and never questioned it. Like everything else she said, I just accepted it at face value.

MURPHY: Why?

PAUL: Because it was easy. ( _Pause_ ) John, I suspect, saw right through it all.


	15. Never Knew This Thrill Before

Chapter Soundtrack: "[Besame Mucho](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0VwQXnkDqU)"

* * *

JOHN: From the moment she turned up on Paul’s porch, she scared the shit out of me. It was enough to see her beat up, you know. I could handle that. Liverpool was a rough place. It’s not like she was the first person we knew who went through something like that. But her mood swings… she was clawing her way back from something very dark, and I think that more than anything scared me the most. I just didn’t have the time or the energy or the inclination to handle it. Not after Stu. 

* * *

PAUL: He was really torn up over Stu’s death. We all were, in our own ways. But I did tell him about what she’d said, the whole thing about sex being a commodity. And I think he was as shocked about it as I was. But what was ironic was that there we were, just off the Reeperbahn, spending the money in our pockets on girls who were stripping in these clubs… the same thing, the embodiment of what Julia was talking about, sex as a _literal_ commodity. But we couldn’t see it, the similarities. Or I couldn’t, at any rate.

* * *

JOHN: Jules wasn’t herself; hadn’t been since winter. She’d dropped out of art school in the months we’d been gone. And then Cyn had heard it from one of my friends that Julia had been hanging down at the docks, alone one Friday night. I mean, what would she be doing down there? I didn’t want to believe it, but in light of what Paul had told me in Hamburg, Julia’s whole philosophy about sex…

* * *

PAUL: I hadn’t heard the same rumours that John had, which is probably a good thing because I doubt I would have handled it well. ( _Pause_ ) I guess when I really stop and think about it, the flow of information was always very one-directional. John rarely let on when he knew something, so I was often left in the dark. But I told him _everything_. In the end, maybe that’s why Jules never opened up to me about _anything_ …

* * *

17 June 1962

Forthlin Road

“No, no, we’ll be back!” Paul shouted as he shoved his foot into his shoe. From within his living room, the cries of dismay were raucous. He was deserting his own pre-birthday party to find a girl.

“Well if we’re not here when you return,” Pete drawled, “We’ll be at the Jac. All right?”  


“All right,” Paul nodded. John slumped against the wall and seemed ready to fall asleep. Paul grabbed him by the arm and pulled him upright, then made his way for the door.

“Now why’d you have to go and say a thing like that, John?” Paul said as he dragged a legless Lennon out behind him. 

John slurred his speech in his own defence. “I didn’t know she’d go all… _barmy_ on me! Christ… ."

Moments before, in a fit of drunken buffonery, John had raised his voice in song—an inebriated, half-slurred version of "Besame Mucho", which they'd included in their recording session the previous week at the fancy EMI Studios in central London and which had been played already, along with their entire recorded setlist from that day, about a dozen times. Everyone had been on board with John's mangling of this particular song, with lyrics forgotten in English and garbled in Spanish as he saw fit. Even Julia had laughed; Paul had been so happy to hear her laugh, too. 

But when John had noticed, as he often did, he took the opportunity to get his digs in, with lyrics made up on the spot and designed to needle their way under Julia’s skin.

_“ Juuu-li-a… why're you so pe-cuuu-li-a… _  
_Each night I sing to yer tits but yer frigid, Miss Fitz..._  
_She's savin' herself fer Master McCharmley_  
_Or givin' it away for free to everyone but me..."_

Now, John tripped over a raised edge of the front walkway. Paul grasped him under the arm and hauled him up again.

“Yer gonna be the death of me, Lennon.”

“Yes mum, sorry mum,” John muttered with a chuckle.

Paul scanned Forthlin Road, in both directions. “Which way did she go?”

“That way?” John offered.

With a shrug, and because he had no better ideas himself, Paul agreed. As they walked, a cool spring breeze picked up and swirled around them, and the farther they got from Paul’s front door, the less John stumbled as he walked. 

“It’s freezin’ out ‘ere,” he complained finally.

“But yer soberin’ up already,” Paul remarked, clapping a hand on the guitarist’s shoulder. 

They reached the corner of the street; it was getting dark, the road lit by street lamps spilling cones of light across the pavement. Paul glanced to his right, looking for oncoming traffic, before stepping out into the road. John followed close behind.

“She was mad, eh?”

"What do you reckon?" Paul scoffed. “You called ‘er frigid and then implied she was a whore, John.”

“Shit,” John cursed. He shook his head. “I don’t know what I was sayin’… .”

“‘S okay. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

Paul wasn’t entirely sure of the validity of his claim, but if the recent past were any indication, Julia’s moods had been in freefall; there was no predicting which way they’d turn. He had been concerned at first that perhaps she was pregnant; but she wouldn’t let him near her, not even for a friendly hug most of the time, and Paul was almost certain that no one else was closer to that goal line than he was.

Except John.

His half-drunk lyrical assertion that Julia was making it with everyone but him had irked Paul mightily. He'd seen the way John bristled at the flirtatious way Julia touched Paul; it was entirely possible that the elder guitarist was harbouring resentments. Was it lingering from all those years ago, or were they fresh? Why was John acting so jealously?

But Paul shook his head. Not five minutes earlier, John had sat in Paul’s family living room and cracked the most cruel and heartless jokes about her that he could muster—asking her whether Miss Fitz could “fit” Paul in for a undercover handshake or two between clients and what the going rate was for such things, seeing as how it was his birthday and she was such an expert on _commodities_ of this nature. Paul winced at the memory.

Were those the actions of a man enamoured? 

Rationally, Paul knew they couldn’t be, not really; no one saying things that hard-hearted could honestly claim to love the target of such barbs. But Paul couldn’t shake the feeling that, for John, perhaps he _could_.

The sound of their shoes striking the sidewalk brought Paul back to the present, mere moments before John’s voice broke through Paul’s reverie. 

“There she is.” 

Following the line of John’s arm, Paul saw Julia sitting on the darkened porch of the house Paul recognized as her old childhood home. Her back was to the railing; the house was bathed in darkness.

“Oh, Jesus…,” she slurred her words, a little drunk herself, as she saw them. “Why’d you come lookin’ fer me?”

“Because, love, it’s my birthday,” Paul grinned. He bounded up the steps to the porch; John, wisely, chose to stand halfway between the porch steps and the beginning of the sidewalk leading to it.

“I don’t wanna talk about it.”

“John didn’t mean it, you know that,” Paul reached over and tried to smooth away a strand of Julia’s now platinum blonde hair behind her ear. She jerked away at his touch.

“Just go, Paul,” she said. “Happy Birthday and all. But fuck off, yeah?”

“I didn’t mean it, Jules.” John’s voice was small and sounded faraway. He didn’t look up at her as he spoke.

“You called me a fuckin’ whore, John.”

“No I didn’t,” he protested, glaring at the two of them. “I might have _implied_ that you’re a tease but—”

Paul shot him a look and John, perhaps for the first time ever, obeyed him. But Julia groaned, leaning her head back against the chipped and peeling wood railing.

Paul turned back to Julia. “Look, I really want to be with you tonight. Tomorrow is my twentieth birthday,” he tried again, furtively, to caress the side of her face. She flinched—barely—as his fingers stroked her cheek. “Besides, Julia, yer my girl…”

She grinned. “I’m not yer girl. I’m not anyone’s girl.”

Paul sat down on the step. “He’s really sorry y’know.”

John, hearing this, kicked a pebble on the sidewalk. “I’m beggin’ yer forgiveness.”

Julia let herself smile. “I don’t know, Lennon.”

“I’ll make it up to yeh.”

“How?”

John shrugged. “I dunno, but I’ll think of somethin’,” he said finally.

“That might be the best you’ll ever get out of ‘im,” Paul said. “I’d take it if I were you.”

A car pulled over on the opposite side of the road; a horn honked, and their attention flew to the curb, where two more cars had joined up. George led the charge, leaning out the window in the back seat of the lead vehicle, while others in the following cars did the same.

“John? Paul?”

“Yeah, George!” John hollered back.

“You comin’?”  


John turned back to Paul and Julia. “It’s your birthday, Macca,” he said. “What’re we doin’?”

Shouts from a second car greeted them. Paul glanced at Julia, and then back at John. “Not until tomorrow, it isn’t.”

“Yer not comin’ then?”

Paul shook his head. “We’ll meet you there, how about?”

John shrugged. “Suit yerself.” He took two steps towards Julia and extended his hand. “I’m John. I’m an arrogant, selfish, piece of shite arsehole and a nasty bastard to boot, but I promise you, I’ll do better next time.”

Julia smiled and stuck out her hand; they shook, and John tipped an imaginary hat before spinning—awkwardly, still half-drunk—and running off to meet the car. The caravan sped off, and as the whoops and cries from the people within died down, Paul became aware of their sudden aloneness.

“You should have gone, Paul.” 

Julia rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand and tried to blink away the fogginess that resulted; he hadn’t been counting, but Julia had had at least three drinks in the first hour she was at his house. She was most certainly feeling the effects now.

He shook his head. “It’s more important that I stay with you, I think,” he shrugged. “Well, I _want_ to stay with you, anyway.”

“Well, where are we going to go?” she asked. “Yer dad is probably going to bed…” she tripped over the word ‘probably’. Paul grinned sideways at her.

“Why don’t we go to your place?”

He knew he was reaching. Julia scowled.

“Why?” she asked. “You thinkin’ I might cave and give yeh a good toss?” She threaded her fingers through her hair and sighed. “Do you tell John everything I say or just the real embarrassing stuff?”

Paul sighed. “Look—I’m sorry. He’s me best mate. And the things you said…”

“What things?” she asked. “About sex?”

“Yeah,” Paul said. “Yeah, the things you said about sex.”

“Christ Almighty!” she cried. “You see? This is what I was talking about! Yer too emotional. You’re letting yer heart get in the way of things it’s got no right to be near in the first place.”

Paul just stared at her. “I don’t understand you.”

She stared at her hands. “Well I don’t want to be understood.”

Paul sighed and shrugged, leaning back against the bannister as the streetlights beyond the reach of the stoop began to replace the faded light of the sunset as the primary source of illumination on the street. 

“I don’t know what to think about you, Julia,” he said finally. “I don’t _understand_ …”

“What’s there to understand?” she asked. 

He gestured around them to the porch. “This house has been empty for years. Did you really live here?” he demanded. “I don’t know why you would lie about that, but—”

When Julia kissed him, his first instinct was to push her away, but as her hands worked on his button fly and she moved her lips down his body, he almost forgot how to breathe. He responded to her touch, all traces of his line of questioning dissolving into the summer air the moment she wrapped her lips around him. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the bannister. There, in the darkness of the porch of an empty house, Julia gave Paul his birthday present.

When she finished, she kissed her way back up to eye level. “Happy _early_ birthday,” she whispered.

Paul’s clumsy hands tucked himself back within his jeans; Julia swiped the back of her hand across her lips and chuckled.

“Where did you learn to do _that_?” he asked. It was, perhaps, the best blowjob he’d received, certainly since Hamburg. His mind was scattered.

“Too many questions,” she nodded at him, losing her smile as she crossed her legs and turned away from him. “I’m sure you got better than that from your German whores.”

Paul was at a loss; he wanted to tell her it wasn’t true, but he was afraid of her response. “Well,” was all he could think to say.

After a long moment, she pushed herself to her feet, swaying there as she braced herself on the railing. “Should we go then?”

“Where?”

She grinned. “Didn’t Pete say they were going to the Jac?”

Paul nodded. “Right. For my birthday.”

Julia snickered. “You’re a bloody mess, Paulie.”

“And whose fault is that?” he grinned at her.

Julia’s smile vanished. “Whose fault?” she asked. “You know, Paul? I’ve been wondering about that very thing for a long time…”

It was a cryptic thing to say, but Paul didn’t linger on it. He was learning quickly that the best way to stay on Julia’s good side was to know when to let things go.

* * *

PAUL: It seemed like the perfect situation at the time—all the benefits of a relationship without the drawbacks. But I guess I wanted more. I never wanted to be alone. That’s always been my biggest problem when it came to these things. I wanted intimacy and closeness, and for such a long time, I got neither with Julia... 

* * *

JOHN: I didn’t understand why Paul was getting so worked up about it. He wanted more out of the relationship than she was willing to give. He wanted commitment, and she wasn’t ready for that. It wasn’t long before Cyn and I were a walking cautionary tale about getting what you wish for, and I complained about it to Paul, but—

WILSON: He didn’t see it that way, I suppose?

JOHN: Paul has always been a very typical Northern English bloke, you know, wanting a home and hearth and all the trappings of family life. That was never my thing. So I didn’t have a lot of sympathy for him. I would have _killed_ to be in his shoes—all that freedom and a beautiful bird tossing me off left and right—and there he was moaning…( _Pause_ ) Ah, but of course, that’s not even true, is it? She wasn’t just a beautiful bird now was she?


	16. Marriage License

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: "[Runaway](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziLagAgoPCE)"/"[I Only Have Eyes For You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvzNeh4Mq1o)"

* * *

PAUL: Long before all the trouble they had, before Julian and all the hurt that kid went through… long before they even dreamed of ending their marriage, before they were even _married_ , I think the first real casualty of the Lennons' relationship was Pete Best.

MURPHY: How do you mean?

PAUL: Because none of what happened with Cyn was on John’s terms, at all. He felt like it was spinning away from him, his personal life. This—his professional pursuits, the band—that was something he could control. He was frustrated with one part, and he fixed it in another… and we were accomplices, no doubt about it.

* * *

16 August 1962   
Brian Epstein’s office, NEMS  
50/52 Great Charlotte Street, Liverpool

John led the trio through the store, up to the second level offices, and towards the room where Brian was sure to be; behind him strode a confident Paul, while George lagged at the back. 

“Are we sure this is the right move?” George asked.

“Cold feet?” Paul joked.

“Well maybe we ought to tell ‘im ourselves,” George pointed out. “Seems unkind to do it this way.”

“But this is how it’s done,” came John’s cool reply as they reached the door. Before another word could be said on the matter, he rapped his knuckles three times on the wood, and they waited.

Brian’s assistant answered the door; seeing who it was, she swung it wide. 

“D’ye have a minute, Eppy?” John asked.

Brian waved them in. “That’ll be all, thank you,” he smiled at his assistant, who shut the door behind her as she left. “What brings you in?”

“We need you to fire Pete.”

“Diplomatically, of course,” Paul added.

Brian looked up from the papers he was engrossed with and leaned back in his chair. “Well, this is a surprise.”

“Not really,” John said. “We’ve been thinking about it for ages. He’s not in sync with the rest of us. He’s off.”

“He won’t wear ‘is hair like us,” Paul piped up, thinking it a salient point to make.

Brian nodded. “It’s not the most convenient time to start auditioning drummers. You have engagements booked throughout this month and into the next.”

John shook his head. “Auditions won’t be necessary. We found someone to replace ‘im.”

“Who?”

“‘Is name’s Ringo,” George said.

Again, Brian nodded, recognition dawning on his face. “Rory Storm’s drummer,” he sighed. “So—and please, correct me if I’m wrong—but you want me to fire your existing drummer and poach another, all in as polite a manner as possible and while keeping all of your existing agreements in place?”

“Yeah, that’d be fab,” George drawled.

Brian flicked a fingertip over the end of his nose. “I won’t lie to you boys, Mr. Martin already told me he wasn’t interested in Pete. I believe he’s hired a session drummer for your recording date with him.”

The news shocked no one. 

“You can tell ‘im we’ll have a drummer before then,” John replied. “I already talked to Ringo.”

“You did?” Brian asked.

“You did?” echoed Paul.

John nodded. “He’s up in Skegness with Rory and the band. As soon as they finish up, he’ll be ready to sit in.”

“When will that be?” Brian asked.

“Couple of days.”

Brian nodded, thoughtful. “Well, are we all in agreement then?”

John turned to look at George, and Paul cast his own sideways glance at the younger guitarist. But there was no hesitation; George fell in with the others.

“Consider it done,” Brian said.

“Thanks, Mr. Epstein,” Paul said, turning to leave the room; George’s hand was on the doorknob.

“Actually, that’s not all,” John said.

Paul and George turned back. John, looking nervous, cleared his throat.

“Cynthia’s expectin’.”

The news hit Paul like a hurricane. He stared at John, slack-jawed. 

“Preggers?” George asked.

Brian was most aghast; Paul had never seen a man turn as white as quickly as their manager in that moment. 

“John, that’s a terrible joke to play," the older man said.

“Oh, it’s not a joke,” he chuckled, staring at his shoes. “Confirmed and everything.”

Brian leaned over his desk and stood up; temporarily losing his composure, he ran a hand back over his hair and took a deep breath.

“How far along?”

“Couple of months,” John replied.

Brian stood up and smoothed his tie. “Will you allow me to take care of the arrangements?”

John’s posture swung defensive. “I’m fairly certain she’s keepin’ the baby.”

Brian shook his head. “Of course,” he said, blushing ferociously. “I didn’t mean _that_. What I _meant_ was… of course, there will have to be a wedding. And you’ll need a place to live. _Those_ arrangements.”

John nodded, hanging his head.

Paul couldn’t help but feel for the guy. Marriage and a baby at twenty-one, when those two things were the farthest thing from his mind. He instinctively clapped a hand on his friend’s shoulder.

“It’ll be okay,” Paul said. “Cyn’s a good girl.”

“Yeah,” John nodded. “Thanks.”

“And you’ll ‘ave yer very own Beatle baby,” George drawled.

“That no one must find out about,” Brian insisted. “Fans, promoters, they must all be kept in the dark. This is the kind of thing that could derail what you’ve got before you realize you’ve got it. Is that understood?”

The three of them nodded, with John looking particularly pale.

Finally Brian eased up. He smiled and came around the side of his desk and stretched out his hand. “Sincerest congratulations, John. I’m certain you’ll make a wonderful father.”

John seemed to relax, slightly, as he shook Brian’s hand. “Thanks, Bri.”

“Let me handle everything,” he said. “Pete, the wedding, accommodations—”

“You really don’t have to.”

“Nonsense,” Brian smiled. 

And that was the end of that.

* * *

As they wandered the half block from Mather up to Paul’s front door, John and Paul were silent. The heat of the summer sun forced Paul out of the jacket that the chilly morning had necessitated; he slung it over his arm, footsteps crunching along the gravel. They’d been wandering aimlessly all day, trying to avoid places where they might run into Pete by accident and staying away from anywhere he might seek them out on purpose; that included their homes, where they could easily be reached by phone. So they’d listened to records quietly at NEMS until they knew Pete had been called in, then had lunch at a nearby but out-of-the-way chippy and watched an impromptu kids’ football game in a schoolyard they happened to pass by, hoping they’d killed enough time to avoid their former drummer entirely for the worst of it.

By now George had long gone home, his mother’s cooking drawing him away. John had nowhere special to be, and neither, it seemed, had Paul. So the pair had made their way along the roads, by bus and on foot, until they reached Allerton and eventually to Paul’s street.

Crickets chirped in the long, unclipped grass. Far away the shrill shrieks of playing children echoed long and loud, both forcing Paul to face a harsh truth: you can’t be a kid when you’ve got a kid on the way.

Paul cast a sideways glance at John and felt heartsick for him.

“Remember summer break from school?” John asked suddenly, breaking the still silence of their walk.

Paul nodded.

“Those were the best days,” he said. He kicked at the sidewalk. “Sleepin’ in late, saggin’ off with yer mates, kippin’ in the fields.”

“Nothing like it,” Paul replied.

John sighed. “Stu was supposed to be best man at our wedding, whenever it happened. And I was goin’ to be his,” he said, remembering their rooftop conversation from the year before. “I sure didn’t plan this to happen this way.”

Paul nodded. “I know.”

“But it’ll be alright.”

“Yeah,” Paul said. "Yeah, absolutely."

Again, the silence settled between them, heavy with the heat in the air. 

“You know… Dot was pregnant for a time.”

John turned to look at Paul. “Oh fuck off with you.”

“Straight up.”

“When?”

Paul shuffled his coat from one arm to the other. “A while back. I was still in school.”

“What were you gonna do about it?”

Paul shrugged. “Marry her,” he said. “I dunno. I thought kids’d be fun.”

John scoffed.

“She lost the baby,” Paul continued. “Bit of a relief, I suppose, now that I look back on it all. I wasn't ready to be a Dad.”

He glanced at John, the way he’d hung his head as soon as Paul had said the words. There would be no such relief for John, and Paul felt rotten having brought it up at all.

“It’ll be okay,” Paul shrugged.

“Easy for you to say," John said as he dragged his toe against the sidewalk by accident. "You'd make a great Dad, even at seventeen, I reckon."

Paul scoffed. "Doubtful."

"And when it happens—when you an' Julia start makin' that great McCartney brood—"

"Julia?" Paul asked.

John turned to look at him. "Or whoever," he said, swallowing hard as he began to crack wise. "I mean, you've got to actually get her in bed first, eh?"

But Paul didn't really hear the rest of what John said, if he'd said anything at all. All he could think about was the prospect of a life with Julia, something which he'd quietly been hoping for but never seriously considered possible until he'd heard it voiced aloud by John. 

_ A big McCartney brood... me and Julia... _

As they reached the garden gate of the McCartney residence, they saw Father Jim tending to the hedges. Paul was filled with tenderness and guilt at the sight. He was certain that it hadn't crossed his father's mind that he'd eventually be raising two boys on his own; he'd done it, though, without complaint. And yet there was Paul, flooded with relief that his girlfriend had lost their own baby years earlier, that he wasn't in the same position that his best friend beside him was in. Did he deserve to even  _begin_ thinking about a family with anyone else after that?

Jim raised his head and saw the two entering the garden. “Afternoon, son. Hello John.”

“Afternoon sir,” John said.

“You going out tonight?” Jim asked.

Paul nodded. “We’ve a booking in Chester.”

Jim nodded before turning to Paul. “Mike’s already set the table. Would you go give the potatoes a stir?”

“Sure, Dad,” Paul said.

Jim turned back to John. “Would you like to stay for supper?”

“No, thank you,” John said. “I imagine Mimi’ll be expecting me. Can’t disappoint ‘er.”

Jim smiled but said nothing. He tossed the clippings from the hedges into the refuse pile and clapped his hands together to shake off excess dirt and trimmings before tidying up.

Paul shrugged at John. “See you tonight, then?”

“Yeah,” John said, turning around and heading back up the street toward Mather again, and the buses that would take him back to Woolton.

Paul trudged to the door.

“Is everything all right?” his dad asked.

Paul nodded. “Fine. Just… feels like a long day.”

Jim smiled. “Quite right.”

Of course, the minute Paul walked in the door, Mike was already leaning on the doorframe. “Pete called,” he said. “I’ve never heard him that mad…”

Paul groaned and tossed his coat onto a nearby chair. 

“What happened?”

“We sacked ‘im.”

Mike let out a low whistle. “No kiddin’!” he said. “Maybe there’s hope for me yet. I always wanted t’ join me brother’s group.”

Paul cocked his head, annoyance flashing on his face. He reached out and flicked Mike’s left elbow, still in a cast from an injury sustained at camp. “With that bum arm? Get serious.”

Mike scowled, feigning sadness. “He never believed in me,” Mike said as he wandered off into the house. “All those years…’e never said I could do it.”

Paul shook his head and kicked off his shoes, settling into the chair with his coat. 

“Oh!” Mike yelled out. “Jules stopped by too.”

_Julia_ …

Suddenly, there was a reason to perk up.

“Paul, did you stir the potatoes?” Father Jim called in through the half open door as he passed around to the back garden.

“Yeah, yeah,” Paul muttered, pushing himself up out of the chair and into the kitchen. 

He had bigger fish to fry.

* * *

PAUL: It may surprise you but that was the first time that marriage really interested me. aside from Dot, of course, which wasn’t the same thing. I’d thought about, talked about it, obliquely, always as some far off distant thing I might do someday. But even though John and Cyn’s was a Registry Office wedding, it was still sort of romantic, you know? And that’s when I started really considering it as an option for me and Julia.

MURPHY: Really?

PAUL: Well yeah. Things were _happening_ , you know, faster than we ever expected. That thing they called Beatlemania. We were being mobbed at shows, and those shows were getting bigger and bigger—more of the concert venues, real theatres and such, rather than just halls and ballrooms. We had bookings at the BBC, we were flying to London, we were recording… all that madness was starting. So when we weren’t busy and had moments for ourselves, there really wasn’t _time_ for much more than what she and I were already doing. We were sleeping an entire city apart. I thought “If we could get a place together, if we could just be living together, how great would that be!” ( _Pause_ ) I just wanted more. I always wanted more than she was ever able to give me…

* * *

26 October 1962

Forthlin Road

“We charted.”

Julia had barely gotten through the door and Paul was already in her face. She looked annoyed at his bombardment.

“What?”

Paul grinned from ear to ear and held up his copy of the New Musical Express. “Right here. Number forty-nine!” 

Julia’s eyes widened as she grabbed the magazine out of Paul’s hand. “Ye’ve gotta be fuckin’ joking.”  


“Not even a little,” Paul said, flipping to the national chart listings. He already knew by memory where their song was, and he jabbed his finger into the page to show her. “‘Love Me Do’, right there.”  


Julia giggled. “Christ,” she said, turning to look at Paul, admiration in her eyes. “That’s absolutely bloody fantastic!”

“Isn’t it?” he said, embracing her. “I feel like I could go to the fuckin’ moon, Jules!”

She squealed and Paul twirled her around the room, depositing her back on the floor as he planted a kiss on her lips.

For a long moment, it seemed as though the world stood still; Julia didn’t move. Paul pressed the advantage, tilting his head to the side to deepen the kiss. To his surprise, she let him. Her body rose, and she stood on her tiptoes, her arms around his neck as she pulled herself closer.

_Wouldn’t this be the icing on the cake?_ he thought. _Making love for the first time, right here, on the day our first song enters the NME charts?_

But it wasn’t to be. Paul slid his hand into the small of her back, flattening his palm and spreading his fingers as he caressed her through her thin cotton shirt before lifting it and putting his hand on her bare skin. In an instant, she froze; a second later, they had parted, and Julia, flushed and bothered, jutted one hand on her hip and wiped her lips with the other.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just…I—”

She shook her head. “I wasn’t expecting it, that’s all.”

_For me to touch you?_ he wondered. 

She read the confusion on his face and strolled back over, slinging an arm around his shoulder again. With her other hand, she started to undo his belt. 

Paul pushed her away. “No, Julia. That’s not—that’s not what I’m after.”

She was shocked. “What do you mean?” 

“Would you come with us to Hamburg?”

Julia’s jaw dropped. “Hamburg?”

“Yeah. Next week. For two weeks. And again in December,” he reached for her hands. “They’re talking about a lot of trips to London, and maybe by next year it’ll be so many we’ll have to relocate.”

“To London?”

He nodded. “I want you there. I want you there for everything. I want _you_ …”

She smiled. “Paul, this is all very sweet, but—”

“If I asked you to marry me—”

“No,” she shook her head and pulled out of his grasp. “You don’t want to marry me.”

“Yes I do. I will.”

She started to laugh. “Paul, no. You don’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m me, and you’re you, and I’m already sharing you with half of Liverpool. Pretty soon you’ll be bigger than anything and then what? I’ll be sharing you with all of England?”

Paul shook his head. “You don’t have to share me.”

“You’ll never be wholly mine,” she said. “And that’s fine. But I don’t want to kid myself that this is anything more than what it is.”

She grabbed her purse, preparing to leave.

“And what is this?”

She shrugged on her jacket. “I don’t know Paul. But I tried to keep it simple…”

Paul was indignant. “Oh right, with the rules, is that it?”

She scowled at him. “Goodbye, Paul.”

“Julia—”

But she was half way down the garden path towards her car by the time the last syllable of her name had left his lips. He watched her drive away, furious with himself and confused about how it all had gone pear-shaped so quickly.

* * *

PAUL: By the time we got back from that second last trip to Hamburg, she’d forgotten it all and things were back to normal. Or what passed as normal for us. It was absolutely maddening.

MURPHY: Did you mean it though?

PAUL: When I asked her to marry me? ( _Pause_ ) I’d have done it in a heartbeat if she’d have had me... and then this might have been a very different story. 


	17. 'Cause I Couldn't Stand the Pain

* * *

 Chapter Soundtrack: "[If I Fell](https://open.spotify.com/track/5n2y1dBN9497mPIrCnwRTo?si=4Z3BGs10QzS46uiZp4BUAg)" / "[Because This Must Be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZdsD4d4Q9Y)"

* * *

WILSON: Did you love her?

JOHN: Was it love? Or was it obsession? ( _Pause_ ) How should I know?

* * *

16 December 1962

36 Falkner Street

5:30 AM

“Why don’t you try this?” Paul muttered, strumming John’s guitar, holding the chord position upside down on John’s right-handed strings. “Hear the tension there?”

John wrinkled his nose. “I don’t know,” he yawned, reaching his fingers up and under his black frames to rub his eyes. They sat on the floor against one wall of his and Cynthia’s small flat. High off their night—a show at the Majestic Ballroom, Birkenhead, followed by their win at the first annual _Mersey Beat_ poll award show, which meant a very early morning closing performance—Paul and John had agreed to a writing session. It would be hours still until the sun rose; the ground floor was bathed in darkness, little pools of light from table lamps casting stark shadows inside the mostly featureless box. John wasn’t fond of the place, but not for any obvious reasons: it was immaculate and clean, comfortable without being stuffy, much like Brian. But John simply couldn’t wait until he and Cyn could buy a home, a place they could call their own. A place to raise their child.

For now, Brian’s bachelor pad, a stone’s throw from the Art College, was it.

John shook himself awake and took his guitar back from Paul, forming the chord. “So it’d be…,” he trailed off, fingering the strings on his guitar, singing as he went: “E minor… da da… A, A, A, A… D nine…?”

“Yeah, hear that?” Paul scribbled in the book on his lap. “Doesn’t that sound a bit better?”

They traded guitars again, and Paul played the same bit for John, humming along to the chords he strummed. John tapped out a bit of a rhythm, one hand on his thigh, the other on the body of Paul’s bass, laying in front of him. “Yeh, all right,” John finally said, bringing his notebook up and changing the chord sitting above his hastily written lyrics.

“Got a title yet?” Paul inquired.

John shook his head. “I’ve been toyin’ with a few different things. I haven’t figured out all the lyrics yet though.” He tossed the book down onto the floor. “When I get that straightened out… .”

“Sure. Sure,” Paul muttered, “Lyrics first.” His pen was perched between his teeth as he strummed out a few more chords, careful not to wake Cynthia.

“ _Melody_ first, son,” John teased. “Don’t you know _anything_ about songwriting?”

Paul grinned. There was a knock on the door.

“Oh, Jesus, I forgot!” Paul leapt up. “I told Jules to meet me here at—” he glanced at the clock on the wall. “Well, _now_.”

He scurried across the room to open the door. Julia stood, her hand poised to knock a second time. She smiled. “Hi.”

“Hi,” Paul replied. 

She peeked around him and waved at John, who absently waved back. 

“How did it go tonight?” she asked.

“Fantastic,” Paul replied. “We won the popularity poll.” 

“Well done,” she smiled. “On the up and up, as always.”

Paul motioned to John. “We were just workin’ on one o’ John’s songs. I’ll be out in a jif. Maybe we can have an early breakfast.” He took Julia’s hand in his, stroked his thumb across her white knuckles; John saw her blush as she pulled her hand away. But Paul didn’t see it at all. He simply spun around to face John. “If ye don’t mind, that is.”

John yawned again and set his guitar down. “Nah. I’m knackered.” He looked at Paul, who seemed to be searching John for confirmation that he was actually okay with calling their writing session to an end. “Go on. I wanna sleep anyway… .”

“You sure?”

John didn’t answer. Instead he turned his back on the young bass player and set his guitar down inside its case. He knew perfectly well that breakfast was not the order of the day; with any luck, Paul would be at the height of orgasmic bliss within the quarter hour and that would be it. John didn’t want to think of it.

“Go on,” he waved his hand. With his back still turned, he heard the door close, clicking shut quietly, and he heaved a sigh of relief that Julia was gone. The fact that he was now a married man seemed only to heighten his awareness that they could not be together, thus making her more desirable to him than ever before. When she’d poked her head in, John felt his heart leap into his throat and the bottom of his stomach drop out. He’d missed her more than he thought possible. The fact that she was with Paul cut him deep.

He picked up the rest of their writing supplies—old school books and pens—and leaned his guitar case against the wall. He was tired, and with nothing to do that day until their Cavern show that night, he was determined to sleep as long as Cyn would let him. But first he needed to eat. 

Ten minutes passed. John ate cookies and had a glass of water as he read through the lyrics he’d been working on. He didn’t know what stopped him from going up to bed. As a clock somewhere in the building began a six o’clock chime, he heard the sounds of a quarrel from the street outside; without having to think hard on it at all, he knew where it was coming from.

A car door slammed shut; there were heavy footsteps on the landing outside. John heard Paul come in again, far less quietly than he’d left, long before he saw him with a nasty scowl etched on his face. His clothes were disheveled and his dark hair was slightly matted to his forehead; the red stain of orgasm streaked the apples of his cheeks. John couldn’t help feeling slightly pleased with the knowledge that Paul’s backseat quickie had turned ugly, and all in a matter of ten minutes.

“I’m off,” Paul said, dumping his bass into its case and lugging it with him as he stalked across the wooden floor. “I’ll fuckin’ walk if I have to.”

“Lover’s quarrel?” John teased.

Paul used up a considerable amount of effort holding his tongue; John could see a vein sticking up in Paul’s neck, throbbing incessantly. “Somethin’ like that.”  
“See you tonight then.”

“Mmh,” Paul grunted, and then he was gone. The quiet in the flat was thick; suddenly, John didn’t feel quite so chuffed. He wished he could call Paul back.

He rubbed his eyes again, lifting his glasses for better access. The cookies had taken the edge off his hunger and his fatigue. He was determined to get the first lyrics right. Setting his glasses back on his nose, he sat down at the table and continued to fiddle.

“ _If I give my love to you_ …,” John said. He shook his head and scratched out the word ‘love’. “ _If I give my_ … .”

“Heart. Try heart.”

John looked up to see Julia, once again standing in the doorway. He hadn’t even heard her come in. He'd wanted to scold her, tell her to get the hell out before Cyn woke up, or at the very least to mind her own business. But her suggestion intrigued him. He looked down at the chords, imagining their sounds in his head as he sang the words: “ _If I give my heart to you… I must be sure… from the very start... that you…_.”

He trailed off, suddenly very impressed with the sophistication of the rhyming scheme and the way it had occurred so naturally. The mess of lyrics in front of him wouldn’t do; he scanned the table for something to write on, and landed on an old Valentine’s Day card, stuffed and long-forgotten between the pages of a notebook. Flipping it over, he scribbled the lyrics on the back; it was as if the key had suddenly fit in a lock that wouldn’t budge, and now that it had, the words poured from the tip of his pen like water. He looked up. “Not bad, Miss Fitz.”

She sniffled. It was apparent she’d been crying. “May I come in?”

John made a half gesture, indicating that the room was hers for the taking, as he continued writing. She whispered “Ta” and stepped in, closing the door behind her before joining him.

“‘Spose you heard that,” she indicated in the direction of her room. “The fight.”

John nodded. “None of my business.”

Julia scoffed. “Yea, right.”

He set down his pen. “Do you want me to ask?”

She shrugged. “Suit yerself, Lennon.”

She sank into the sofa next to him; their shoulders touched, and her thigh pushed against the body of his guitar. Annoyed at the invasion of his space, he scooted over, releasing a half inch of breathing space between them; within moments, they were touching again. With a sigh, he began to strum again.

Julia watched him in silence for a while, but eventually it became too oppressive. “All right, I want to talk, and I don’t care if you don’t listen, I’m just gonna say it anyway.”

“Suit yerself, Fitzpatrick.”

“What’s crawled up yer skirt?” 

John sighed. He hadn’t meant to rag on her, but he was more than a little bit aware of the frustration he felt sitting inches away from someone he wanted so bad he could taste it, and yet not being able to possess her. He practically vibrated as he thought about it; this he channelled into the guitar, the chords, the melody…

“Yer such a fuckin’ big shot, aren’t yeh?” Julia interrupted his thoughts, barely raising her voice above a whisper.

John didn’t reply.

“Well yer not, y’know," she muttered. "Yer just a Scouser, just like the rest of us, and if yer not careful, one of these days yer gonna look up and all of us’ll be gone and it’ll just be you and _then_ won’t you be sorry…”

John stopped playing. “I am sorry, Julia. I really am.”

She’d been preparing another diatribe and John’s words caught her off-guard; to be truthful, they’d caught him off-guard too. He wasn’t entirely sure what he was apologizing for either. He just felt it needed to be said.

She sat there, mouth half-open, ready to speak, for a long while; but the words she had wanted to say died on her lips. She quizzed him with her eyes and then broke into a smile. “I wish I could stay mad at you, John, but I never can.”

“Part of my charm, I s’pose.”

She smiled, brushing hair behind her ears. “I suppose.”

He relaxed and strummed the guitar absently. 

“It’s just that… Paul wants me…” she sighed. “He wants to marry me. He’s been on me about it for weeks, and—”

“Is that what you fought about?” John asked, incredulous. “Christ, Jules, women drop like flies whenever ‘e walks by! You’re the only person I know who seems to be immune.”

“I’m not immune,” she said. “It’s just—it’s complicated.”

John sighed. “Look, Julia, I know you said there wasn’t, but if there _is_ another guy—”

“There isn’t anyone else,” Julia said, the blade of her voice slicing the space between them with swift precision.

John was feeling tired and combative; his sleeping, pregnant wife on the other side of the bedroom door was the only thing stopping him from a full on verbal assault. “’S not what I heard…”

“Oh?” she asked. “And what did you hear, exactly?”

John considered his words carefully before speaking them, absolutely intending for them to have maximum impact: “How are things down at the dock?”

Julia seethed; her eyes narrowed. “Not that it’s any of your fuckin’ business, but that has nothing to do with me an’ Paul.”

“Then what is it?” John folded his arms over the top of his guitar, suddenly argumentative. “Because that seems to be the very crux of the matter, isn’t it?”

Julia scoffed, snorting harshly as she wrung her hands in front of her. “I don’t know where you get yer ideas.”

“Fuckin' hell, Julia,” John said. “I’ve got Paul tellin’ me you won’t let ‘im kiss you and I’ve got you tellin’ me it’s complicated, and—”

“That’s part of the problem. We’d never have a normal relationship; he’d be runnin’ off to tell you everything. And besides, we’ve got a good system going.”

“Right,” John continued. “Every guy dreams of havin’ a girl like you just tossin’ ‘im off left an’ right.”

“Are you _fuckin_ ’ serious? Does he tell you everything?”

John didn’t know what to say. He opened his lips to breathe, and words tumbled out. “How can you say it’s a ‘good system’ when, as far as anyone can tell, you and Paul are a one-way street?”

She steepled her hands in front of her, flexed her fingers, and then dropped them to her knees. “I give him what he wants, and he gives me what I want. He wants sex, and I want… ”

She trailed off then, and John cast a sidelong glance at her. She stared at the wall opposite them; her face was stoic, calm, but her eyes, silver in the waning moonlight, told a different story.

Julia continued, haltingly. “Well, I want… see it’s really all about… you can keep the _control_ , you see, if you don’t let ‘im… for you, I mean… if it’s not _mutual_ … because when it’s mutual, it’s lo—”

Her lips started to form the word, and in his mind John had already filled in the blank: Love. _When it’s mutual, it’s love_ ; that’s what she was going to say. But he watched her mouth pull back from what she’d started to say, watched her tongue settling again behind her teeth, her lips closing, her throat swallowing the word whole. She pursed her lips together and blinked several times before continuing, in a voice so quiet John had to strain to hear her.

“We all know you can’t love something you hate, or love some _one_ if they do some _thing_ you hate, so…”

His question came out slowly, pulling at his lips as if it suddenly didn’t want to be let out. “What do you hate, Julia?”

She continued to stare at the wall in front of them. “Can I ask you something? Was it because I turned you down all those years ago that you told everyone I was a lesbian?”

John looked down and pretended to tune his guitar. "I don't know what you're—"

“I’m not mad, y’know,” she replied. “I just… well, sometimes I think it would be easier if I were. A lesbian, I mean. Women are so much nicer to women than men are to women.” She laughed a little and paused, looking down at her hands. “But maybe not.” She turned to John. “It was mean, you know. What you told everyone.”

John just continued to strum. “They were just words, Julia.”

She picked at a fingernail. “To you, maybe,” she whispered, settling her hands back on her lap. "Fists aren't the only way to batter a woman, John."

He looked at her. She breathed in and out a few times; she played with her hair and he saw her wiggling her toes beside the ornate wooden legs of the sofa; she was biting her lip and the inside of her cheek. He got the distinct feeling that she’d said something that she hadn’t meant to say at all.

John could read between the lines. He knew what they were talking about, and he wanted to tell her he didn’t want to know any more; he wanted to know why she was coming to him and not Paul with her stories and confessionals; he realized all at once just how broken she’d been, physically, emotionally, by the man named Dick, the one with the knife, still pressed against her skin. 

Was he the only man whose anger had left its mark on her? Suddenly, John wasn't so sure...

She scowled, her face and her body going hard, rigid, angular. “What if I told you to lick my cunt right now? What would you do?”

He pretended to be nonplussed. “I guess I’d lick your cunt.”

Julia's voice was thin, high in her throat, trapped against her soft palette. “Do you want to?”

She was scared. She was unsure. John could see all of that as plain as day. He wrapped his fingers around the neck of the guitar, pretending to feel out a chord. “You don’t want me to,” he said.

She shrugged. “No, I suppose I don’t,” she said. “But _I_ control it now,” she continued, her voice barely a whisper. 

"Do you now?" he asked, utterly unconvinced.

She nodded. “I’ve gotten very good at deadening the parts of me that feel…”

“Why?”

She took a breath. “So I never have to feel...,” she whispered, trailing off . 

He knew better than to interrupt; after a moment and a long, deep breath, she continued.

"Because I do feel. I still feel it all. In my body, in my mind, when I’m about to fall asleep.” She fidgeted. “So I don’t sleep, John. I can’t. The memories, they just—”

He swallowed hard against something stuck in his throat. “Jules—”

“I need to keep it together,” she continued, full of purpose, straight as an arrow. “You lose control if you can’t keep it together, and you can’t keep it together if you like it. So I _choose_ not to like it. Any of it.”

“You don’t like it,” he stated. 

She took a deep, shuddering breath and chewed her mouth more vigorously; her toe wiggling had become nervous toe-tapping. When a tear ran over her lashes and spilled down her cheek, she uncrossed one arm and briefly, angrily, swiped at the track it left on her face. “How can I like anything _he_ did to me?” she asked the walls, the artwork hanging off them, the lampshades and the window dressings and the knick knacks scattered throughout, directing her voice everywhere at once except to him. “How can I like something that is so…?”

Comfort was not something that John felt built to offer; it wasn't part of his makeup. And yet, he set his guitar down on the floor and reached over, slowly, to let his hand graze her forearm as she sat motionless beside him.

She continued to stare straight ahead. “Trust me, it’s easier this way.”

“Easier than what?”

Julia resisted, trying not to look at him, but his hand rested so close to hers, their little fingers touching. She didn’t pull away; boldly, he covered her hand in his. They were sitting so close now; it was nothing at all for John to lean forward, to close the gap between them, and let his mouth find hers or worse, to take her up on her offer from a minute earlier. He thought about doing it—pictured it in his mind, wondered how she would feel against him, what the sweet heat of her tasted like. But he couldn’t—not like this. Not after what she’d said. 

Instead, when she finally dragged her eyes up from her lap, he leaned in and pressed his lips to hers. She gasped, a barely-audible “Oh” escaping from her throat just as they met, tender, soft, gentle. Chaste, entirely. He pulled away after a moment, the soft sound of their parting lips the only noise in the room. They’d each stopped breathing.

Inches apart, eye to eye, he waited to see how she would react; in the half-light, and even with his glasses on, he strained to see her at all. But she lifted her hand and pressed it, warmly, against his cheek. His heart leapt; delighted, he leaned into her.

“John…”

She lifted her lips to his again, molding to him, inhaling sharply as she returned his kiss. Desperate to keep her, he cocked his head to the side and made a tighter seal against her mouth. She grasped him with both hands, pulling him to her with such force that it hurt. Pressed against each other as they were they couldn't get any closer, and yet the chasm felt unbreachable. John groaned his displeasure and felt it echoed back to him from the base of her throat as, eventually she moved, pivoted, swung herself out and up and over until she was in his lap. Thighs parted, knees dug in on either side of his narrow hips, pressing herself against his hardened cock, still separated by far too many layers of clothing.

Bravely, he took a chance, slipping his fingers between the waistband of her trousers and the skin of her belly, burying them in her soft curls at the juncture of her thighs as she straddled him. She gasped, breaking their kiss as she pressed her forehead to his, casting her eyes downward to watch his machinations. He watched her watching him; the way her mouth hung slack, the focused furrow of her eyebrows, determination and desire pooling in her blown pupils and evidenced by the lick of lips. It was—by far—the most erotic thing he'd ever seen. He strained against his jeans as he pushed himself wrist deep beneath her pants; his fingers finally found the warm wetness he’d produced in her, and her eyelids fluttered shut as she stifled a moan, holding her breath and bearing down as she rocked her hips against him. With his other hand wrapped around the back of her neck, he pulled her down to him, against his mouth, and as he slipped one finger within her, then two, he felt her keen into him, catching it against his tongue, behind his teeth, swallowing it whole, willing the evidence of her mounting pleasure to become part of him. 

John crooked his fingers in time with her movements against him, cupping her face with his other hand now, the palm of his hand pressed against her racing pulse. He had just enough mental acuity to recognize the thin line along her jaw where the skin was different; bumpy, jagged, running parallel to her jawline. He recalled that rainy night nearly a year earlier... the stumbling drunk... the knife against her pale skin.  Without thinking, John tenderly traced the line, lost in her warmth and his own blossoming protectiveness…

Suddenly, she startled; pulling away, their lips made a loud ‘Pop!’ and she sat up straight as a board pushing him down against the sofa's backrest. She threw his hand away from her waistband and stood up, backpedaling right into the table behind her in her sudden and furious haste to put as much distance between them as possible.

"What—?"

“Jesus,” she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Cynthia is…” she was breathless, her words airy and thin. “She’s my friend. And Paul is yours. I like him,” she said. “I like him a lot.” 

John bristled. He adjusted his glasses on his nose and gained his feet. "So what does that make me?" he asked. "What does that make what just happened?"

She yanked her sweater closed around her and began to walk toward the door; John was two paces behind. “I don’t want to mess this up. Please,” she put out her hands as he gained on her. “Don’t come closer. I don’t want to mess this up. He’s so kind, really he is,” she continued, turning around, her hand on the knob. “He’s the only one who’s ever _wanted_ me for more than one night—” 

“That’s not true,” he blurted. 

She glanced at him, a sad smile hiding in the corner of her mouth. “What, do _you_ want me?” She shot another snort out her nostrils. And then she looked away, unhitching the door. “It’s a beautiful sentiment. It’s why I’ve always liked you, John: you have the ability to produce such _beautiful_ sentiments. But you don’t want me.”

“And what makes you so certain?” John asked, hating the way his voice shook as they carried his words to her.

Julia was halfway out the door, but she stopped, turning back to him but not looking at him; her head bowed, she fixed her eyes on the floor between her feet and his. “Because I’m not that lucky,” she said, with such finality that he could feel it, the weight of her words, as they hit him in his chest.

She stepped across the threshold and out into the narrow entryway. He listened at the door, her retreating footsteps growing fainter and fainter until he couldn’t hear anything except his own heartbeat drumming in his ears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know exactly when "If I Fell" was written but as it was a finished song a little over a year later when they were making "A Hard Day's Night" I figured it couldn't hurt to have John starting to work on it now.


	18. It's All Fun and Games Until...

* * *

 Chapter Soundtrack: "[An Echo of Night](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuYIs6K4zME)" 

* * *

PAUL: That row in front of John and Cyn’s was one of the worst. I didn’t know if she would let me make it up to her, but then she came around find us at the Cavern when we were setting up for the show that night and everything seemed to be fine. More than fine. She was in the best mood I’d seen her in in weeks. Months maybe. ( _Pause_ ) She helped us unload the van and then she said she had an idea for a fun game or something. It was our last performance at The Cavern that year before we left for Hamburg again. I thought it had something to do with that…

* * *

JOHN: She just told us to follow her, so we did—George and Ring, Paul and me, and Neil even, and about ten minutes later we were standing in front of the big central library. There was this broken latch on one of the doors around the side of the building. I don’t know how she knew that but she did. That’s how we snuck in. She led us straight into this huge reading room, this big circular space with tables and chairs and all around on the walls were books. Just row after row of books…

* * *

_NEIL: I met Julia and right away thought she was funny and clever. She was very bright, sharp. Witty. I think she would have had to be to keep John interested, and he was interested, believe me. But I didn’t know to what extent until late in 1962. We spent a bit of time together by virtue of the fact that we lived so close—she was six houses down or something from Mona’s, where I was living at the time. […] I didn’t know the intimate details of what happened to push her to move out of her family home or anything like that, but I knew it was traumatic enough to make the two of them worry like mad over her. Honest, when Paul wasn’t with her, John was, always with Cyn of course, but you knew he wanted to be there because he wanted to be near her. It was obvious. They were both infatuated with her, and I knew as well as anyone else that it wasn't going to end well as long as that continued. […] The night we broke into the library, I just happened to be there with them—one of those things that happens at the time and you don’t think about it until years later and that’s when you realize how pivotal it really was—but I saw what happened, the aftermath. Bloodied faces and broken fingers. It was about as bad as it could have gotten without one of them dying or being really seriously injured, broken necks or something, and I believe if George and Ringo hadn’t been there to break it up, they might not have stopped until… well, anyway, that’s how I knew that as long as Julia stuck around, bright and brilliant as she was, she was going to be the end of The Beatles._

* * *

16 December 1962

Picton Reading Room

Liverpool Central Library

They stood on the balcony looking down into the cavernous space below, filled with books, and someone let out a low whistle. Pale light from the waning gibbous moon was all the illumination they had to go by, but what shone through the glass oculus high above them in the domed ceiling was enough.

Julia’s reverent voice broke through the awed silence. “Yer actin’ like you’ve never been in a library before.”

“Go find the oldest book you can,” Julia said, her voice low.

Ringo tittered drunkenly. “What’s she on about?” 

“Don’t ask questions,” George replied. “Julia says find a book, it’s our job to find a book.”

“Any book?” Ringo asked.

“No questions!” George joked.

Both men stumbled forward on jelly legs, having downed a number of beers between the two of them before Paul, John, and Neil had shown up with the van. Neil was off like a shot, and Paul not far behind. 

John watched as Julia turned around and leaned against the balustrade behind her. 

“You’d better go,” she whispered.

John just looked at her. Their encounter that morning seemed wiped from her mind, entirely; bitter and resigned, John endeavoured to do the same. 

“Whatever you say, Miss Fitz.”

Julia scoffed and pushed herself off the railing, walking away from him; he watched her for a moment before going off the other way, grabbing random book off the shelves, stacking them in his arms as he went. Julia’s game reminded him of the night in front of the _bouquinistes_ in Paris, which suddenly felt so very very long ago. But the dozen months between then and now had encompassed a lifetime, of professional triumphs—recording, performing, Hamburg—and personal setbacks—Stu’s death, Cyn’s pregnancy, firing Pete…

Julia, bloodied and broken, on a cobblestone street… in Paul’s narrow childhood bed… 

_Stop it, John_ , he kicked himself mentally. _Look at the books_ …

It was only then that he realized he couldn’t actually read any of the books he was grabbing; he didn’t have his glasses. Frustrated, he dumped the books he’d found on the floor, where they slid sideways in a jumble that he felt sorry about the instant it happened; someone was going to have to put those books away, he knew. But his guilt only lasted a second. He stalked back, past Ringo, who had the same idea as he’d had to gather as many books as possible and search for dates later; George was down around the far end of the upper circle, stumbling along the bookshelves. 

He couldn’t find Paul.

“Paul!” John shouted.

Ringo hushed him from the stacks. “This is a library…” he said, his whispered voice still echoing around the old room.

“Carry on, then,” John returned, winking at Ringo before continuing on his way.

John wandered back to where they’d started, and turned down the stairwell to the lower circle; that’s when he heard it. The muffled sounds coming from around the corner; unmistakable to his ears. He didn’t have to see what they were doing to know.

Blood pounded in his temple; after everything she’d said, here she was, on her knees in front of him, gripping him with one hand and steadying herself against him, her other hand wrapped around his leg. Paul, eyes closed and head back against the books behind him, could not have been farther away.

“You fuckin’ bastard,” John menaced.

Paul’s eyes snapped open, and Julia got to her feet. “Fuck, John!” Paul cried as he hastily put himself away. Julia’s hand flew to her face, covering her mouth.

“You let ‘er do that to you?” John barked. “After everything she’s been through, you still treat ‘er like some fuckin’ play thing?”

“What are you talkin’ about?” Paul replied, his voice rising in pitch and volume as his erotically-addled mind scrambled to catch up. “I have _no fuckin’ idea_ what you’re talkin’ about!”

“Sure you don’t! I’ll bet she never told you! Did’ja, Jules? Did you tell him about yer stepdad?”

“Please,” she begged him. “You promised.”

“Promised what?” Paul asked, his eyes flying back and forth between their faces. “What the hell is goin’ on here?”

“Didn’t anything that I said to you get through?” he asked. “Didn’t it mean anything?”

“Didn’t _what_ mean anything?” Paul cried.

Julia started to cry. “John, please—don’t do this.”

Paul balled up his fists. “Are you goin’ around with her, John? Behind my back?”

John turned to Paul. “Oh you don’t know the fuckin’ half of it,” he said. “She’s gone around with enough sailors to be classed as a seaport!”

Paul shook his head. “You fuckin’—.”

John was seeing red. “Don’t you think yer mum’d be proud of you now,” John spat. “Fuckin’ class acts, the both of yeh—”

He lunged, head first, and tackled John, pushing him backward and into the fire exit door and down into the stairwell.

* * *

 

PAUL: I lost it. Pretty soon we were at each other’s throats. Quite literally. He tossed me into the stairwell and I tried to throw him down the stairs. I’ve never wanted to hurt someone so much in my entire life. ( _Pause_ ) You've got to remember that I didn't know about her stepdad. I didn't know any of it. And what I suspected was just that—a suspicion. John knew so much more than me at that point... so all this insinuation, about him and her, and her and her stepdad, coming from John the way it had... I was blinded. ( _Pause_ ) But I think I was always blinded, by one thing or another...

* * *

Liverpool Central Library

Picton Reading Room - Emergency Exit Stairwell

Five minutes later…

Paul leaned against the rough concrete wall of the stairwell; John propped himself up on the railing. Both were bleeding—John from a busted lip, Paul from his left nostril. Their heavy, raspy breaths echoed around them. Neither one moved for a very long time.

“You’ll have to keep fighting me, John. I’m not gonna give ‘er up,” Paul spoke at last.

“Neither am I,” was John’s response.

More tinny breaths. John coughed into his shoulder, bloodying his shirt. He wiped at the blood spot absently with his right hand. “I think I broke me finger.”

A rhythm guitarist with a broken finger was one hell of a thing for a band to be saddled with but Paul didn’t give the comment a second thought. “Serves you right for punching the wall, mate.”

“I’m not yer fuckin’ mate.”

“Suit yourself.”

Stony silence followed.

“What are we gonna do, then?” Paul asked.

John was out of ideas, his one and only being to beat the living daylights out of the younger bass player in the hopes he’d renounce his claim on the only girl he’d ever wanted this badly in his life. He spat blood onto the stair in front of him. 

“I’m not givin’ ‘er up.”

Paul pulled a long blonde hair from around the belt loop of his trousers. Jules's hair. His mind flashed back to the scene upstairs, a scant five minutes earlier. He’d buttoned up so quickly once John had found them...

He blushed and tossed the hair aside. “Well we can’t both fuckin’ have ‘er.”

John was silent, as if considering the proposition. It gave Paul pause: _Could it be done? Could he conceivably share a woman with John Lennon?_

John shook his head finally. “Let ‘er decide.”

“What?” Paul asked.

“Let Julia decide. Me or you. It’s that fuckin’ simple.”

Paul had his doubts. If Julia picked him, that would be it and he could get on with his life; but if she picked John…

“I’m not pickin’ either of you tossers,” came a shaky voice above them.

Both men turned their faces up to see Julia striding down the stairs. Paul scurried out of the way so she could get down from the last step without tripping over him.

“You’re both so fuckin’ stupid,” she drawled. “If I ‘ave to choose, I choose neither.”

And with that, she continued right over them both as if they didn’t exist. They listened to her footsteps as she got farther away, then the door on the lowest level creaking on its old hinges as she pushed it open and slammed it back into the door frame, its echoey percussive reverberations ringing out for an eternity after she’d gone. 

John spat again onto the step. “Fuck me.”

Paul simply scoffed. He touched his nose; the pain was blinding. His fingers came away wet and stained with blood. 

“What the fuck are you doing, Paul?”

The question caught Paul off-guard. He stared at the wall opposite him.

“I mean, Christ,” John continued. “Who do you think she is?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

George and Ringo peered over the railing and into the stairwell from the floor above and called out their names. Paul hadn’t realized how far down he and John had tumbled as they fought.

“Don’t play dumb, you know damn well,” John shook his head.

“No, John, I don’t.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, don’t be so daft!” He jabbed his unhurt finger into his own forehead. “Think about it! What’s happened since February… .”

“ _I don’t know_ what’s happened since February!” It was the truth, too. Half-spoken truths and innuendo aside, he'd been given nothing except access to Julia's body. And even then...

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” John muttered. “Well I’m glad she had me this mornin’ when she finally wanted t’ talk. Apparently I’m the only one who cares enough about ‘er to try an’ help, instead of just usin’ ‘er for me own—”

Paul balled his fist up at his side as George appeared, taking a step down and letting the sole of his shoe smack loudly on the concrete step, breaking Paul’s concentration and cutting John off mid-sentence. 

“Let it go, Paul,” George said quietly.

“Yeh,” John repeated. “Let ‘er go.”

George shook his head at John's obvious inversion of his meaning. Ringo had joined George, both of them sensing another blowout and steeling themselves in case they had to intervene.

“Look, John...,” Paul started, hauling himself to his feet. He pointed a finger, but immediately thought better of saying anything: John sat, head in his hands, bleeding and spitting on the stairwell. When he looked up at Paul, his eyes seemed to plead with him to kick him, toss him down another flight of stairs, finish him off and have done with it. But Paul wouldn’t—couldn’t—give him the satisfaction. He took a deep breath and spun around, stomping up the stairs and passing George and Ringo on the landing between floors and Neil at the door on the level of the upper circle.

He didn’t know what to think. He thought he’d been good to Julia. He had done everything she’d asked. He never really demanded anything of her; he’d been quite willing to accept the “rules,” because she’d gotten so upset whenever he suggested otherwise. It never occurred to him to think that she might be covering up, protecting herself from something else, looking for a way out.

And he _never_ , in a million years, would have dreamed that she’d seek out John Lennon for help.


	19. Hints and Accusations

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: "[Lose the Police](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_oSSbn9oBQ)"

* * *

  _NEIL: I met Julia and right away thought she was funny and clever. She was very bright, sharp. Witty. I think she would have had to be to keep John interested, and he was interested, believe me. But I didn’t know to what extent until late in 1962. We spent a bit of time together by virtue of the fact that we lived so close—she was six houses down or something from Mona’s, where I was living at the time. […] I didn’t know the intimate details of what happened to push her to move out of her family home or anything like that, but I knew it was traumatic enough to make the two of them worry like mad over her. Honest, when Paul wasn’t with her, John was, or they were asking about her, and vice versa […] That’s the first hint I had that they were both infatuated with her, and that it wasn't going to end well for anyone as long as that continued. […] The night we broke into the library, I just happened to be there with them—one of those things that happens at the time and you don’t think about it until years later and that’s when you realize how pivotal it really was—but I saw what happened, the aftermath. Bloodied faces and broken fingers. It was about as bad as it could have gotten without one of them dying or being really seriously injured, broken necks or something, and I believe if George and Ringo hadn’t been there to break it up, they might not have stopped until… well, anyway, that’s how I knew that as long as Julia stuck around, bright and brilliant as she was, she was going to be the end of The Beatles._

* * *

 17 December 1962  
12:04 am  
The Cavern Club

Patched up as much as they could be, The Beatles performed at The Cavern that night to the hysterical adulation of their fans, doing their best to _mach schau_ for the young people of Liverpool. And _mach schau_ they did, at least as far as the fans were concerned, but it was a lackluster show by the band’s own standards, and they all knew it. John’s hand ached and even though his finger wasn’t broken—according to Neil—he couldn’t strum his guitar to save his life; Paul flubbed the intro to three songs by confusing or missing the opening bass lines entirely. If the harmonies between Paul and John were off, so be it—there was no way to get them to share a mic so they could hear each other and no one dared to offer a correction if they couldn’t hear and got it wrong. Half way through the show, John’s lip cracked open and began to bleed again; George took over on vocals and played John’s rhythm part while he had his lip looked at for a second time by Neil.

Ironically, the only consistency in the entire evening was Ringo and his metronomic back beat; he was the only Beatle to really hold it together, and he had really only been a Beatle for a scant few months. 

At the end of the show, Paul hurried off stage first; John marched behind.

“Forget ‘ow to play that thing again, McCartney?” John taunted as they reached the relative privacy of the small backstage area.

“I swear on my mother’s grave, Lennon, if you so much as _breathe_ loud enough for me to hear—”

George and Ringo, who followed close enough to intervene for a reason, jumped in between the two men; Ringo held John back by the shoulder and George grabbed Paul’s arm. They both wedged themselves between the warring factions.

“Grow the hell up!” Ringo yelled at them both.

“Yer acting like a couple o’ children,” George reprimanded.

Paul shook his head and yanked his arm out of George’s grasp, depositing his bass in its case. “Well ‘e started it!”

John made a face at him. No sooner had John put his tongue back in his mouth than Paul lunged, determined to pulverize. George stepped in front of Paul; Ringo had to use his whole body to stop John.

At that precise moment, Brian hurried in. He slammed the door shut. “ _Enough!_ ” he cried.

All four men stopped dead in their tracks. Their soft-spoken manager had never once raised his voice in the year they’d known him; like spoiled, scolded schoolchildren, John and Paul hung their heads. 

“Look at yourselves!” Brian said. “This has gone on long enough."

"And all over a girl," George said.

“She’s not just a girl,” Paul said.

“She’s more than that,” John argued.

“I don’t want to hear another _word_!” Brian said. “What in God’s name do you think this is? You are _professional_ musicians. _Contracted_ _musicians_.”

He nearly collapsed into a chair beside the door and used a small square handkerchief to dab at his forehead; Paul reckoned he'd never seen Brian so unseamed. “I don’t want to hear what I heard tonight _ever_ again. That was _horrid_. Paul, your timing was so off you might as well have been playing a different song!”

“He was!” John countered.

Brian jabbed a finger in John’s direction. “Don’t you even start with me. I don’t know _what_ you called that out there, but it _wasn’t_ rhythm guitar.”

“My hand,” he lifted his right hand, slightly swollen and red across the knuckles, but Brian just waved him off.

“No excuses, John! _Professional!_ ” He held his head in his hand. “What am I going to do with you?” He wasn’t asking anyone in particular; his voice was so soft, they could barely hear him. He got up then and excused himself. With his free hand, he waved in the general direction of the four of them, though he was only talking to two. “George, Ringo: babysit them.”

John and Paul exchanged hostile glances.

“He’s right, y’know,” George said. “Spoiled babies, the both of you.”

“What about Jules, though?” Ringo asked. “In all of this bickerin’ have either of you given any thought to her?”

“You ‘eard her,” George said. “She doesn’t want either of you.”

“And I don’t blame her,” Ringo added. "You ought to just leave her be."

John flexed his hand; Paul toed a small pebble tracked in from outside with his boot. They glanced up at each other at virtually the same time. 

“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Paul sighed; he sat down in a chair beside the dressing table.

“ _We’re_ not going to do _anything_ ,” John said, motioning quickly between him and Paul. “Got that, _mate_?”

Before Paul had a chance to react, a knock at the dressing room door drew their attention away from each other. Ringo strode over to open it, cracking it slightly to see who it was before swinging it open to reveal two uniformed police officers.

“Good evening,” one officer said.

“It can’t be that good,” George quipped. “Not when you’ve got bobbies bangin' at yer door.”

The second officer glanced at a notepad in his hand, just as Brian walked back in, suddenly aghast.

“What can we do for you?” he asked.

The second officer returned the notepad to his pocket. “We’re looking for a young woman. Eighteen, nineteen years of age. Brunette, about this tall,” he said, raising his hand to a height that hit him at the shoulder. “We heard she spends time around here, that you might be friends.”

“Her name’s Julia Fitzpatrick,” the first officer said.

“She’s blonde,” Ringo offered.

“Bottle blonde,” George offered, and Ringo looked surprised.

“I’ve only ever known ‘er as a blonde.”

George shook his head. “Bleaches it, just like all the others.”

Brian cleared his throat and shook his head. “I’m sorry officers, but she’s not here.”

“But you know her?” the first officer asked.

“Yeah,” John spat, “But what are you looking fer her for? So she broke into a library. We’re as guilty as she is. We were there too.” He offered his wrists. “Cuff us and take us in, might as well.”

The second officer allowed a smirk to cross his face at the sudden and unbidden confession. “What's this about a library?" he asked. "Have you been brawling?" 

The look on Brian’s face as even more blood drained spoke volumes; Paul wished John had kept his mouth shut. For his part, John simply lit up a cigarette as if nothing had happened.

The first officer cleared his throat. "We just need to talk to her, that's all.”

“What about?” Brian asked.

“Her whereabouts on the night of February twentieth.”

Paul furrowed his brow.  _February 20th..._ he wondered.  _What happened on February 20th?_

“And what happened then?" Brian continued.

“I’m afraid it’s a delicate issue,” the second officer said. 

“Then I don’t think there’s anything more we can do for you, is there?” John barked.

Then it hit Paul; his stomach bottomed out. “John—” Paul whispered.

But John didn’t hear him. He waved his arms around the small room, without closets or bureaus or anywhere a person could hide, continuing: “Clearly, she’s not ‘ere.”

The two officers exchanged glances; they’d dealt with his type before. 

“John,” Paul tried a second time, and John looked over at him; the fire in his eyes was doused the very instant their eyes locked and the worry on Paul’s face registered. He simply shook his head; John turned white, and Paul went cold.

The second officer shifted his weight and closed the notebook in his hand. “Well if you do see her, can you let her know we need to speak to her, that it’s about a matter of some importance, regarding the attack on her and her stepfather.”

The first officer shot his partner a look and the second officer pursed his lips. The whole room was silent.

“What attack?” Ringo asked.

“You'll be sure to contact us the moment you hear from her?” he first officer asked as he handed Brian his card.

Brian nodded. "We will, yes."

Satisfied with Brian’s answer, the two officers excused themselves.

Brian shut the door behind them but said nothing. 

"When was she attacked?" Ringo asked again.

“The night of February the twentieth," Paul whispered.

"I remember," John said.

Paul swallowed. "Did she tell you anything about it? Did she say anything to you?"

John leveled a gaze that told Paul that he knew far more than he would be willing to let on; Paul felt his own ears burning.

No one said a word; for a long moment, the heaviness in the room overwhelmed its occupants.  In the pervasive silence that followed, Paul ran through every possible scenario that would explain the revelation dropped at his feet moments before. _She never mentioned being attacked? She never told me anything. What had she witnessed that night? What had actually happened?_

“Well maybe we _should_ find her?” Ringo said.

“And then what?” George asked.

John took a long drag of his ciggie, then picked at his lower lip. “I don’t know. But I’m not goin’ anywhere,” John leaned forward, resting his head in his hand. “Paul ‘ere thinks he’s the one who’s won ‘er, so let ‘im be the hero. I’ve got songs t’ write and a band to deal with.”

Paul stared at John; John kept his gaze on the floor. 

“Fine,” Paul said. “If that’s how you want it to be, if yer not gonna fight for her, then I guess I did win. Well done, Lennon. Thanks awfully.”

Paul stood up and strode out of the room, past Brian, who was struggling to catch up with what had been spoken aloud for the first time. Paul reached Neil's side in the passageway, and asked for a ride to West Derby, and Neil agreed. Within moments, they were climbing into the van parked out front, already loaded with most of the band's gear.

“What happened in there?” Neil asked. "I saw police and—"

“Just drive,” Paul commanded, blowing into his hands to warm them up.

Neil started the van and put on his winter gloves; as he was about to turn out of his parking spot, he stopped. “It’s John,” he said, peering at Paul from the side of his eye. “Yer not gonna go spare on each other again, are yeh?”

Paul glanced up. Through the windscreen, he saw John jogging precariously on the icy walkway, heading toward the van. Neil rolled down the window. 

“You comin’ too?”  


John nodded, catching the door handle and throwing the door open as he swung up into the backseat. He was out of breath; every time he exhaled, a tiny speech bubble of air-turned-vaporous escaped his lips. Paul didn’t take his eyes off of him.

“What do you want?”

John swallowed. He breathed in and out a few more times, flicking his tongue over his cut lip a few times in between. “I’m not gonna insult yeh by statin’ what you already know. I know you know she’s special.”

Paul had not been expecting this.

“I am gonna tell you that she’s not a tough as you think she is. She’s just not. And that Dick? I don’t know what the fuck happened to him or where he’s gone, but I know he did a real number on her and deserved whatever it was that he got.”

Paul leaned back in his seat, staring straight ahead out the icy windscreen, wishing for more information but hesitant to ask for it from John. Behind him, John _harrumphed_ loudly.

“You won, okay?” he continued. “You won, because I have Cynthia and soon we’ll have a baby, and Julia always wanted you, so you’ve won.” He paused, taking the beat and gripping Paul’s shoulder with his injured hand, squeezing the bone and flesh underneath it until Paul nearly cried out in pain.

“But if you fuck up—if you even _dream_ of fuckin’ up—I swear, McCartney, you’ll be shittin’ sideways when I’m done with yeh. Are we clear?”

Paul felt as though he’d been given a lecture from his father. He nodded in compliance, and John let go of his shoulder. From the look on his face, it had hurt John as much as it had hurt Paul.

They pulled up to the house. Paul scampered out of the van.

John did not follow.


	20. Just Like Jericho, Let These Walls Come Tumbling Down

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: "[Many Things](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf--hjOuW_8)" / "[Interior Dialogues](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMiIkDbdap8)"

* * *

17 December 1962  
West Derby  
12:44 am 

Paul hammered his palm flat against the door in the darkness of the shade-covered lot. “Let me in, Julia,” he croaked, voice cracking from overuse and the heaviness of the emotions weighing him down. He leaned his head against the wooden door and let out a whimpering sigh.

Lights on inside let him know someone was awake; for a moment he felt bad for almost certainly waking up Julia’s widowed landlady. But it didn’t stop him. He tried the doorknob, again, and found the door was still bolted, just as it had been the last ten times he’d twisted it in his hand.

“Julia!”

The sound of footsteps halted him, briefly, and he waited with bated breath as the latch turned and the creaking hinge gave way and Julia’s form filled the space vacated by the door between them. It was obvious that she has been crying, her eyes red, face streaked with mascara. She smelled strongly of alcohol. 

“Go away, Paul.”

“Why didn’t you answer the door?”

“Because I don’t want to fuckin’ talk to you, that’s why.”

“Too bad,” was his immature retort. “Did you know there were police at the show lookin’ fer you?”

Her eyes snapped up at him. “Police?”

“Yeah,” he said. “They want to know what happened to yer stepdad or something. They say there was an attack. An assault.”

Julia began to shake. She tried to push the door closed but Paul had considerably more strength and sobriety behind his arm, and he kept it open, pushing her back and stepping in across the threshold and out of the cold. Julia fell back onto the steps that led up from the back door to the door of her room at the top; she slouched down on the lowest step, buried her face in her hands, and began to cry.

Paul stood and watched her cry for a long moment, wondering what he was doing there and why he cared so much. Theirs wasn’t a relationship; this night had done more to prove that to him than anything. It was a loose affiliation, punctuated by moments of intense intimacy. He was lost trying to navigate his role here, somewhere adrift between lover and friend, wholly embodying neither.

He didn’t even know how to act. He wanted to hold her, to comfort her, but he had no idea if that’s what she wanted. And he was sick of wondering about that, among all the other things which made him walk as if on eggshells around her. Especially now that he knew she’d turned to John for comfort the night before. The sting of that rejection hurt as much as any of the physical injuries inflicted upon him in the stairwell. He didn’t exactly feel inclined to act.

And yet here he was. On her step. That had to count for something, didn’t it?

In the end, he sat on the step beside her, and she leaned into him. Surprisingly. And like always, he followed her lead, pitching an arm around her shoulder as she folded into the pocket created between his chest and lap, until she was leaned over against him. He rested his chin atop her head and rocked her.

Julia’s wretched sobs filled the stairwell, bouncing off the slick white glossy paint of the walls, up to the single lightbulb dangling on the long cord high above their heads. It swayed, moved by some unknown source, throwing shadows left and right as it did. Paul timed his movements to match.

“Julia, I don’t know what to do with yeh.”

“Neither do I.”

Another long moment, peppered by staccato breaths and the occasional hushing gush of water in the radiator pipes snaking up behind the thin walls. It created a deceptive serenity; Paul knew the moment she spoke, the illusion would disappear.

Still, he couldn’t help himself.

“What happened?” he asked. “Who are you runnin’ from?”

She sniffled. “I thought he was dead, Paul. I really thought he was dead.”

Paul shook his head. “Who is? The ones who attacked you?”

She ignored the question, barrelling on in typical form, a series of seemingly random but interconnected threads of thought made liquid by the scotch on her breath. “He was gonna take me away from here. He was forcin’ me away. I didn’t want to go. It was kidnapping is what it was. We were headed for the train, maybe to Southampton? I hadn’t been outside the house in three days. He kept me locked in a bathroom. I think he owed them money. He thought I had money, from me dad, but I never did. I tried to hide in the bushes but they caught me, roughed me up… I watched a Ted bash his head in with a lead pipe. I saw his blood in the gutter. Nobody came to help. His blood was all over me. I called the police and then I came to you,” she said, finally sitting up and looking him squarely in the eye. “He’s dead… he’s dead… he has to be dead…”

Paul stared back in utter disbelief, desperately trying to make sense of what she was saying. “He… he did what? Locked you in the bathroom?” he asked, utterly astonished. “Yer stepdad did this?”

“I don’t know,” she shook her head. “He was hurtin’ me. He and ‘is mates. But those Teds—if they hadn’t stopped us—”

Paul shook his head and asked questions he almost didn’t want the answer to. “What do you mean, ‘his mates’? What did he do to you? How did he hurt you?”

She looked up at him, and he became acutely aware that he was being scrutinized. Sized up. Her eyes were piercing searchlights then. Scared, yes. Sad, yes. But behind it all was something cold. Something calculated. The artifice around her collapsed and he saw her as if for the first time, with her stories, her tales. In that instant, she was deciding what truths he was deserving to hear, which threads she would pull through the loom and weave into the tapestry she’d finally allow him to see. For the first time in their relationship, Paul watched her through skeptical eyes, looking through her, and he didn’t like what he saw.

Finally she breathed and closed her eyes, her voice a pitched whisper in the stillness of the stairwell. “I’m not that girl anymore,” she said. “I burned everything away.” She half-laughed, half-whimpered, more tears streaming down her face. “I needed to kill what he’d ruined. I needed to excise it, like a cancer. Sex is a cancer—”

Fresh tears streamed from her eyes; whether he was overcome or simply didn’t want to hear any more, Paul wrapped his arms around her and soothed her, rocking her again the way he had moments before. Nothing made sense. An abusive stepfather was one thing; but this story about alleged abduction and assault was something else entirely. This wasn’t at all what he’d imagined…

He eventually lifted her to her feet, tucking her into his side as he walked her up the steps to her room and sat her on the bed and tried to piece it all together for himself in his mind. All Julia did was mutter her quiet ramblings, snippets of conversations half-remembered and quotes from books she’d read. Nothing added up, unless the integers consisted of the very thing that Paul wasn’t able to accept. In the end all he had was the notion that she was either hinting at a truth that was far more sinister than anything he had ever heard in his life, or that she was spinning tall tales. 

_Could_ he believe her?

Paul looked at her with quiet eyes and realised it wasn’t a question of ability but one of want.

He didn’t _want_ to believe her.

And when Julia slowed down and grew tired, she seemed to sense it too. She stopped shaking; her tears slowed. 

“You don’t believe me.”

“That’s not—” he shook his head. “This can’t be your story.”

“It is though,” she said. “I wanted so badly to be better for you. To be the kind of woman who could please you. But you can’t love this, can you?” Her eyes belied the frantic desperation that vibrated her fingertips as she worried them against the fabric of Paul’s shirt. “I’m not a woman you could love, am I?”

“You are,” Paul said. But who was she, really? If she could put on an act all these months, what was real? Was this part of her calculation too? Was she making herself vulnerable to appeal to the side of him that needed her to be a damsel in distress seeking shelter and protection from a worthy knight errant? Is that the role she needed him to fill, and was he obliging because he wanted it too?

The questions were endless and dizzying in the possibilities they presented. Her strange ability to become who he needed her to be had been part of the problem all along; he could see that now. He wondered if he had ever known her and, if he hadn’t, he wondered if he ever could. 

He asked the question again, tumbling it around in his mind. _Are you a woman I could love?_ he wondered. 

“I _think_ you are, anyway…”

She looked up at him. “I’ll try,” she said. “I’ll try for you. Oh, I’ll try so hard, Paul. I will.”

She pushed herself up until she was fully sitting and her desperate hands began to work on the buttons of his jeans. Paul pushed her hands away. 

“Julia—”

“Make love with me,” she begged.

Suddenly facing the prospect of actually receiving the thing that he’d so long been waiting for, Paul felt a heady erotic heat pool in his belly. But in light of what she’d intimated…

“Julia, I don’t know…”

“I need to know that it’s not always going to feel bad,” she explained, reaching for him. He gave her his hands. “I’ve never felt that. It’s never felt like anything other than horrible…”

Paul’s insides twisted as he considered what it was she proposing. Sex with her, at this junction, when he was almost positive there wouldn’t be much left in the morning to hold them together, didn’t seem like the best idea; it wasn’t the worst, but it was far from palatable. Her confessions about her ordeal layered more discomfort on top of all the rest. But undercutting it all was the sudden question of his own abilities, his stamina; was he a good enough lover to do what she was asking him to do? To erase the history of her past in one fell swoop?

“Please?” she begged.

It was a challenge, a dare. His libido and his desire won out in the end, over his fragile ego and all common sense.

He sat beside her on the bed and cupped a hand against her face, along that angry scar, and swallowed hard before pressing his lips to hers—careful to avoid smashing his tender, bruised nose against her—for the first time since their first kiss a year ago in Menlove Avenue.

She tasted of malt liquor and felt stiff in his arms. Paul smoothed her over with kisses and a soft touch, and eventually, his moves practiced from years of attempts with other girls in situations just like this, he slipped a hand beneath the waistband of her trousers.

Julia gasped.

“Are you okay?”

“Y-yes,” she said. “It’s just—”

“Don’t,” Paul whispered, kissing her forehead as he pressed her close to him. “Don’t think about anything else. Just focus on me, here, right now.”

Through heavy eyes she caught his stare and didn’t look away as Paul dipped his hand further, to the warm damp between her legs, to sit his fingers against her.

“Tell me to stop,” he said. “I promise you, I’ll stop.”

“No,” she whispered. “I don’t want you to stop.”

He pushed a slender finger within her and she gasped again, her face flushed as she began to cry. Paul didn’t move a muscle, not until she nodded, and even then he kept the roiling curl of his digit—a single one and then, slowly, two—steady and measured, in time with the heartbeat he could feel, intimately, from within her. 

Paul brought her close, listening to the sound of her breathing and the flush of her face to know how close she was; he freed himself from the restraints of his own trousers with only one hand, feeling it was as close to a miracle as anything he’d known in his life that he didn’t lose control of what either hand was doing as he pushed himself up to eye-level and kissed Julia.

“I’ll stop,” he said against her lips. “Just tell me to stop, and I will.”

“I don’t want you to stop,” she repeated.

He pulled his fingers away—feeling her shudder beneath him—and replaced them with his erection, pressing against the inside of her thigh. Then he whispered a hand over her face and guided himself in with the other, never breaking away from her eyes; buried within her, he began to move, and she began to unfurl, but she never looked away. It was the single most erotic thing Paul had ever experienced—the full-on gaze of a beautiful woman as she achieved orgasm, hearing it in her voice and feeling it in the ripples that radiated from her belly, but also seeing it written in her eyes and on her face. It was his undoing; he lasted all of about thirty seconds. But it was enough, it seemed, for them both.

She covered her face with her hands and began to cry. Paul did his best to soothe, afterglow softened and suddenly caring very little about Julia’s nebulous relationship to the truth, he covered her sorrow.

“Oh, Julia…” he said, kissing her hair. “Love, I’m so sorry—”

“Don’t be,” she whispered between sobs and her own fingers, covering her lips. “I’m damaged goods, y’know, and this was the nicest anyone has ever been with me…”

“Yer not damaged.”

She lifted her hands from her face and shook her head, her lips set in a mid-cry grimace that she quickly shook off, replacing with a smile. _How easy she does that_ , he marvelled.

“And yer a right charmer,” she breathed, sighing heavily into the bottom of her stomach. Her cheeks were still flushed. She looked up at her headboard. “But I’m not a nice girl. Not a good girl. I’m not the kind of person you take home to meet yer mother…”

Paul swallowed his response—something about how she’d already met his dad, and wasn’t it good news for her that his mother was dead—because it seemed crass, in poor taste, and he was already sick of talking about it. He didn’t know what he believed—her words could be truth or lies and he never would know for sure, but the sighs and cries as she came around him were not something to be shrugged off so easily. Confused, he rolled to her side and let her press against him. 

“But I love you, Paul,” she whispered. “I really do.”

She sounded like she was trying to convince herself. But Paul was stunned nonetheless; he kissed her hair and wrapped his arm around her. “I love you, too.”

She sighed again, her backside pressed against him. “Would you read to me?” she asked.

Paul nodded and reached for the only book he knew she’d be talking about—the well-worn copy of _Dubliners_ on her sparse bedside table. He picked up at the top of the page where he found her bookmark, and by the bottom of the facing page, she was fast asleep; he could tell from her stillness and the even-spaced breaths rumbling deep below her sternum. 

He, too, slept like the dead, exhaustion from the show and the fight and the emotional roller coaster finally settling on him, like lead weights pulling him into the soft mattress and the warmth exuding from her body. She snored; he held her close. 

It was, by far, the most intimate thing they’d ever done.

* * *

PAUL: Her revelations, everything she said… it scared me. I didn’t know how to handle that. I didn’t want to believe her, and I know now that she wasn’t being entirely truthful either—not that she was lying, but she was hiding things. She was always hiding things, always showing me only what she felt I needed to know, or what she wanted me to know. ( _Pause_ ) Not that it would have mattered if she’d been more forthcoming. I was… _ill-equipped_ to deal with that in any kind of meaningful or helpful way at the time. We all were. I think, anyway… I mean, what could we have done? Honestly? She was in far bigger trouble than any of us knew. ( _Pause_ ) We left for Hamburg a few days later. It was our last trip there. She didn’t see us off at the airport—she was so afraid to leave her flat—but she promised she’d meet us after we got back, and I believed her. But she split pretty soon after that. I don’t think we’d unpacked our bags in Germany and she was already on the run from Liverpool. ( _Pause_ ) So that was pretty much that…

* * *

JOHN: When it came out that she had gone, and with the way she had up and left, there was a… a finality to it that was hard to ignore. Paul told me what she’d told him, and I told him what I knew. That was the first time we confronted any of it together, honestly. It was a grisly picture. Maybe for a moment we both felt we’d dodged a bullet. It sounds awful, but it was true. For me anyway. I missed her, though, and I know I found a kind of comfort as we bonded over that, especially in those early days when things were starting to pick up, professionally, and we had to be in close quarters—on tour buses and the like. I know I channelled a lot into what we were writing. “[Misery](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXAYtCT8oh4)”—we wrote that on a bus for Helen Shapiro, it would have been a handful of days after we got back from Germany. That one I remember clearly being about her. I mean, they weren’t the best songs. But we were young and thought we were being deep and introspective…

* * *

PAUL: We were writing wherever we could write—on hotel beds, backstage, in the wings waiting to perform. It was like we suddenly had to get all these songs out of us, onto the page, on the records. And they all seemed to be directed at one person. ( _Pause_ ) I don’t know, it seemed like that anyway. We had so many of them that we couldn’t record them all, so we started giving them away. One of those was this real simple song, “[I’m In Love](https://vimeo.com/95663816)”, which went to the Fourmost. It was one of John’s. This whole bit about “tellin’ all my friends I’m in love” and wanting to shout it from the rooftops. I don’t know, maybe I’m reading into it too much, but to me, that’s John talking about Julia in a way that no one would recognise…

* * *

JOHN: Paul always said he said he wrote those songs for the girls listening at home, so they’d think we were talking to them, putting them on a pedestal so they’d buy more records. But listen to “[What You’re Doing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Sba2LbhkVY)”. I don’t know if he was conscious of it, but those opening drums are like a heartbeat, you know. He’s telling her not to play around anymore, that he’s the safe bet, and all she has to do is stop what she’s doing and come back to him. And the unconventional rhymes, the word games he played—“Girl, what you’re _doin_ ’ / I’m feeling _blue an_ ’ lonely”. That’s the kind of stuff she’d like. He’s not talking to some American bird. He’s talking to his Julia. Wherever she was at the time, those words were meant for her.

* * *

 PAUL: “[I’ll Get You”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFEHqFUONHY) was one of John’s. Listen to it: ( _singing_ ) “Imagine I'm in love with you..." you know, and then "It's not like me to pretend but I’ll get you in the end… I will, I’ll get you…” He knew she’d hear it wherever she was and that was enough. I didn’t pick up on it until years later, but by then it didn’t bother me like it would have if I’d known then. It’s still one of my favourites…

* * *

JOHN: People like to say it was this earth-shattering, paradigm-shifting record, but I wasn’t trying to revolutionize songwriting with “[She Loves You.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGbWU8S3vzs)” That was just me telling him “She’s not here, but she loves you, man. She chose you. Be happy with that.” Of course he didn’t realise I was saying it to him, and he didn’t wait for her that long at all. But that was Paul being Paul. ( _Pause_ ) That’s how we got through the contention in those first months after Jules left. We wrote songs together. When we were writing, we didn’t want to kill each other. And I could say what I needed to say, to Paul or to Jules. And all those teenybopper album buyers thought we were talking to them—

\- End Tape -


	21. Out of Body, Out of Mind

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: "[Nocturne](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI2l-v0H198)" 

* * *

Part II  
\- Tape 2: John Lennon -  
\- 24 April 1976 -

WILSON: Tape two, testing… interview with John Lennon… twenty-fourth of April, nineteen seventy six… ( _cough_ ) Can I just clarify what’s happened so far?

JOHN: Sure, whatever.

WILSON: ( _papers rustling_ ) So you first met Julia in 1958 and lost touch with her some time after that, six months or so later; she became part of your inner circle in late 1961 because of Paul’s involvement with her. In early 1962, Julia disappeared without a word and was gone for around one week, correct? And you had no contact with her during that time?

JOHN: Yeah, that’s right.

WILSON: But when she returned she showed signs of mental upset and trauma.

JOHN: Yes. I mean, she showed signs before—depression and whatnot. But after that, definitely, there was more instability…

WILSON: How would you characterize your friendship with her after she came back?

JOHN: It was an uneasy intimacy. I don’t know how to explain it. Knowing more, I should have been more understanding, but knowing more made me angry, and I took it out on her. And she pushed back because that was the last thing she needed. Probably because of that, I wouldn’t say we were exceptionally close. Not to mention that I knew she and Paul were involved, and then I got married and Cyn had Julian, so there were more barriers then. I tried to stay away.

WILSON: Which must have been easier now that you were getting busy as a band?

JOHN: I suppose. And she didn’t stick around very long anyway. She took off before Christmas, 1962. And the rest of that is history you probably already know. We both, Paul and I, more or less chalked up our time with her, however short, as a moment in our lives that had come and gone, and now we’d have to move on because she had, and that would be the end of that.

( _Pause_ )

WILSON: But… .

JOHN: ( _Chuckle_ ) Life isn’t always so tidy, now, is it?

* * *

29 November 1964  
BBC Television Centre - Studio One Dressing Room  
London

John slumped down into his chair in front of the dressing room mirror. He reckoned he should have felt enlivened; having just filmed segments for Dudley Moore’s _Not Only…But Also,_ John should have been elated. Dudley’s brand of humour was right up his alley, and was entirely the reason John had agreed to a guest spot on his programme that night, where he’d read selections from _In His Own Write_ , both solo and alongside Norman Rossington, with whom he’d got on well during their time together filming _A Hard Day’s Night_ earlier that year. It had all been planned to perk him up.

Instead, John was exhausted. He rested his face in his hands and stared into the lightbulb-framed mirrors. The reflection staring back at him was frightening: all the makeup in the world couldn’t hide the sleepless smudges under his eyes or brighten his dull, lifeless complexion. It didn’t help that the bright lights left no room for flattery. 

He didn’t look like himself. 

Not in the sense that he had changed—everybody changes; he knew he’d put on weight, and his hair was getting a bit long, and those gingery undertones were starting to show, but that wasn’t what he was thinking about, what he was _feeling_ , in that moment. Rather, he felt detached. The person sitting in the chair and the person in the mirror were two different people and neither one of them was him, really. 

The sensation was not wholly new, nor was it unusual; he’d felt it the first time he’d smoked marijuana, and he’d felt it several times before that, usually when on a creative high, writing alongside Paul in the wee hours of someone’s morning (not his; never his. He didn’t have mornings, not really anyway. Not in the sense that other people did.) His head expanded; time dilated, along with space, pulled like taffy on a New Jersey boardwalk (he’d seen newsreel footage of it somewhere, and always imagined that that’s what it was like). He felt as if he were floating away from the counter at which he sat, gradually getting further and further away, which was odd considering he shouldn’t have been floating at all; his head was dense, packed full with _stuff_ —thoughts and ideas and cotton balls and motor oil, or at least that’s what it felt like. 

And yet he floated, far away, from himself, whoever that was.

Or maybe he wasn't floating away from it; maybe it was floating away from him. Maybe he was standing still, and everything was drifting away from him instead of the other way around. A faraway lesson from his school days filled his mind: something about the Big Bang, all matter in the universe rushing away from the point of explosion, creating the space it filled as it filled it somehow. John felt like the locus, and the world around him was pulling away. He could see it now, out of body, watching himself at the center of it all, surrounding by a world brought into existence because he stood at the center of it.

He poked at the chub sitting on his jaw and cheeks; from that great distance away, the sight of his arm raising, finger outstretched, was like a film played back at one-quarter speed. Molasses motion. But as his finger pressed into his cheek, the room came slowly back into focus. He didn’t snap back; it wasn’t that fast. It was more like a bubble regaining its shape after landing on the skin of water in the bathtub; flattening slightly, surface tension keeping it from popping but pulling it back into shape all the same. Eventually, he felt himself inhabiting this body that he saw in front of him. 

Fully present once more, John stuck his tongue out at himself, allowed a small, resentful smile, before folding his arms on top of the counter, letting his head slide forward until his forehead touched his hands in front of him.

_I don’t remember the last time I slept_ , he thought. Of course he’d slept; everybody slept, closed their eyes at night and drifted off in dreams. But _really slept_ … the kind of sleep that fills you up; the kind that’s restorative, soulfully. It had to have been years since the last time. Before Julian— _Don’t blame the boy_ , John scolded, though deep down he almost did blame his toddler son. Before America, certainly. Long before Beatlemania.

_Paris?_ he wondered. He sat up then, looking once more into his own eyes staring back at him from the mirror. Three years, it had been, since he and Paul made off for the banks of the Seine and Champs - Élysées with his aunt’s birthday money burning a hole in his pocket; three years since he’d slept on the floor of a bedsit with the sounds of a Parisian street filtering up to the open window; three years since he’d watched a girl try to fly from the railing of a Napoleonic bridge…

He heard a knock at the door and the sound of it squeaking open. “‘Ey Johnny,” George chirped.

“Sod off,” John intoned. “I’m not ‘ere.”

“What crawled up yer skirt?”

John didn’t answer.

“It went well, don’t you think?”

He muttered a response.

“Well I think it did.”

John sat up. “Appreciate it, George. But I need a drink.”

“Wanna go to the Scotch?”

John shrugged. “I dunno,” he flicked his eyes over to George in the reflection. “It’s just not the same as goin’ out used to be.”

George shrugged. “Yeh, but the liquor hasn’t changed,” was his dry reply. 

He smiled at that. “Right you are, mate. Right you are.” He stood up and brushed himself off. “Let’s paint the town. Whaddya say, Georgie?”

“I’m game,” he said, tossing the magazine back on the rack.

John was almost out the door when he realised he’d forgotten his hat on the dresser. Quickly, he doubled back to grab it, pausing only when he saw his reflection once more in the mirror. Two years had turned him from lively to leaden. If he didn’t recognise himself anymore, how could anyone else? 

“When did I get so bloody fat?”

George didn’t appear to have heard the question, which John thought was probably for the best; it wasn’t really meant for George to answer, and even if it had been, there was no safe way to answer it at all.

“All right,” John stood up again, pulling his hat down around his ears. He ground the heel of his hand into his eyes and pinched his cheeks. “Let’s go.”


	22. Ghosts

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: "[Deja Vu](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZiLP7wFs7E)"

* * *

 29 November 1964  
Scotch of St. James  
Two Hours Later...

“Fresh air,” John said.

George squinted his eyes, as if that would improve his hearing. “What?”

John managed a lopsided grin as he cocked his head toward the door, and George nodded. “Fresh air” of course meant a cigarette; John actually wished for marijuana—not that he would smoke it in public though, and anyway he and George had smoked the last of what they’d had on them on the drive over—so a regular ciggie would have to do.

There wasn’t much conversation at the club; too much music, too much movement, too cloistered and claustrophobic. George had been right: two drinks under his belt had taken the edge off John’s foul mood. But it was nothing more than a buzz, and a dull one at that. He still felt strange, too; disjointed, disconnected, uncomfortable in his own skin, unsure even that it was his own. It had been a busy day, full of rehearsals and taping for the television show, and even though John was used to the hectic schedule, something about the dark, enclosed space of the studio made him long to be outside instead of in. 

So he politely excused himself and made his way to the door, stepping out into the narrow Victorian mews beyond and quickly scooting just around the corner from the front door. Pulling the collar of his coat up and the brim of his hat down to hide his face, he shrank against the door to number 9, far enough away from the main entrance to avoid being seen by the admittedly scant crowds milling about on a Sunday night. The air was bitter and smelled like cold mixed with curry and frying sauce from an oriental take away down the street; it half-drizzled, half-snowed. He lit up, cupping his hand around his lighter to make sure the flame caught the unlit tip of his cigarette. As he inhaled, John closed his eyes, not caring that he was getting drizzled on.

“Got a light?” 

John’s stomach plummeted to the pavement. He opened his eyes and prepared himself for the flight back into the relative safety of the club; it was too much to risk being recognized. But his eyes focused on the couple standing in front of him and he squinted at them, their faces blurred and unremarkable without his glasses. After a quick risk assessment— _A couple, older, well-dressed, professionals, she’s annoyed with him for wanting to smoke, she’s cold, she wants to go inside; definitely not teenyboppers, less likely to go spare_ —John relented.

“Yeah,” he disguised his voice and hunkered down inside his coat, shoving his hand within his pocket to produce the lighter again. He offered it into the space between them, and the other man stepped forward to claim it.

“Thank you very much,” the man said. 

John continued to look at the man over the burning tip of his cigarette as he exhaled through his nostrils. He was a prick—John could tell that much; even if he couldn’t see many details about the man’s face aside from the thick-framed Buddy Holly glasses perched on his nose, the way he carried himself, how he ignored the protestations of the woman at his side, made it clear that he thought he was better than everyone. On a normal day, outside a place such as this, John might not have cared so much about hiding his identity, might have revealed to the pair who he was, if only to take the stuck-up bloke down a peg or two; _“Yeah, that’s right, I’m a Beatle, who the fuck are you?”_ Maybe he’d even try to pull the bird, just to see if he could. 

That woman though—the one looking at him with such intensity—was different. She didn’t seem as posh, though she looked the part—long black trench coat, white knee-high boots, shellacked hair up-to-there, like just about every other women crowding the West End streets that night. She was still clearly annoyed with her date for making them stand out in the rain so he could have a cigarette; John liked her attitude, so rare in London women. It reminded him of the girls he’d grown up with, Northern birds who gave it as good as any man did, who didn’t stand their men to act like pompous bastards. She hadn’t spoken a single word to him, and John had already decided he liked her.

But the way she looked at him, _stared_ at him, made him antsy. _Give her a few more seconds, and she’ll recognize me_ , he thought. He hunkered back down a bit more in his coat.

The man nodded and handed the lighter back to John. “Bit chilly out,” he said.

_Fuck off with the small talk_ , John wanted to say. He stifled his groan. “A bit.”

“Wanna share the umbrella?”

John looked up; he hadn’t even noticed that the couple had carried one to begin with. As nice as it might have been to avoid being rained on, John didn’t want to stand any closer.

But before John had a chance to respond, the man laughed and took a drag. “This,” he waved the cigarette in his hand. “This hits the spot. Takes the chill right out of the air.”

John watched as his date leaned against him. The blurred angles of her body seemed to soften. She didn’t berate him under her breath any longer for the delay. John’s nerves began to fray. He cleared his throat and began to make motions. “I’d really better—”

“Hello John,” the woman said.

John heard her voice and knew, in an instant, that not only had he not fooled her a single second with his aloofness, but that his instincts had been exactly right; he _had_ known her, not just as any old Northern bird but _this_ Northern bird. Old feelings like fragrances floated back to him. Both men looked on in shock—for vastly different reasons—as Julia handed the umbrella to the man at her side and stepped forward to pitch her arms around John’s shoulders.

It was an awkwardly familiar embrace; they had never really hugged one another in the years they’d known each other. John was stunned into silence, stillness; only near the end did he find the mobility to thread one arm around her waist and draw her closer. She suddenly stood in sharp contrast to the dreary cobbled yard in which they stood: she was bright, cheery, smelled warm and dry and safe. John breathed her into his lungs as deep as she would go and tightened his grip.

Her urgent whisper was almost lost to the slushy rain sounds echoing around them. “It’s been too long.”

_Where did you go? Where have you been?_ John wanted to ask, his voice caught in his throat as he gripped her, almost panicked to let her go. She did pull away, eventually, the happiness in her eyes giving way to a mixture of regret and hurt and confusion, as if she’d read his mind. For a moment, John wondered if he’d asked his question out loud after all and just simply couldn’t remember.

“Well, aren’t you going to introduce us?” the man beside her asked, his voice edged with jealous entitlement. _God I hope he’s not her boyfriend_ …

Julia flushed, remembering herself, and stepped back to the man’s side. With an oddly graceful mini sweep of her arm, she motioned toward him. “John, I’d like you to meet…um…”

She seemed to lose her train of thought and closed her eyes in frustration as she swept her hand again toward the man standing beside her. Finally the man stretched his arm into the gap between them.

“Carter…,” he began.

“Yes, Henry Carter,” Julia grinned, her embarrassment red on her cheeks.

“ _Doctor_ Henry Carter.”

Julia chuckled nervously. “Sorry,” she apologized, to John’s surprise. “Doctor Carter.”

John peeled his hand out of the other man’s grasp. “John Lennon, Esquire, PhD, BBC, N-Double-A-C-P.”

Henry smiled and tipped his hat back with his fingertip, not obviously impressed. “I’ve heard a lot about you, but I never believed her when she went on about knowing The Beatles before they were famous and all that.”

John was nonplussed. “Well,” was all he said. The thought of Julia telling anyone stories about their youth made him feel… strangely warm and sad, wistful.

Julia smiled and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and looked up at him to smile. 

“So it’s true then?” Henry asked.

“Is what true?” John replied, distracted for a moment. He turned his eyes back. “‘Ey, anyway, what are you doctor of?”

The man smirked. “You mean, ‘of what’?” he _tsked_ and waved a finger back and forth. “Surely you don’t end _all_ sentences with prepositions in Liverpool?”

It was an obvious joke, but John raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Just a few, fer flavour,” he replied. “I mean who bothers with word order nowadays anyway? You should read my book.”

The man smiled nervously and shifted his weight, plainly intimidated. It thrilled John to no end. _That’s right. I have a book. Chew on that._ He couldn’t _wait_ to tell Paul. 

Julia sensed the tension and cleared her throat, smiling at John. “How’s—” she paused. “How are the others?”

“They’re fine. George and Ringo,” he paused. “Paul. All fine.”

She straightened up considerably, her shoulders squaring and the lines of her jaw hardening as she gritted her teeth.

Henry checked his watch with increasing impatience; Julia’s Pavlovian response was to grasp Henry’s hand and move a little bit closer to him than she was already standing. John soured, his contempt pickling his tongue as the words he wanted to say sat thick and heavy, unsaid, behind his lips.

“We’re on our way to an engagement and we’re already very late,” the doctor said.

“‘Course,” John said, stepping back to the wall. He remembered his cigarette, still dangling between his fingertips; it had gone out in the intervening period, a mixture of the snow and rain and a slight wind causing the embers to die off and drift to the pavement as ash. He tossed the stub on the ground and trampled it underfoot. “‘Course,” he repeated.

“Listen,” Julia unlinked her arm from Henry’s, much to the man’s consternation, and stepped forward again. “I live in London now,” she told him, stepping under the awning beside John and pulling out a small pad of paper from her bag, and then producing a pen. She scribbled on the front page and hastily tore the sheet off. “Just moved actually. Marylebone.”

John wondered how such a comfortably middle class address could belong to the working class girl he remembered, but the more he wondered and the longer she stood there in front of him, the more he realised that it was entirely possible the girl he remembered and the girl four feet away were not the same person anymore. 

She didn’t look the same, that was for sure. At this distance her features were clear but different. Gone was the softness in her cheeks and the gentle slope in her shoulders, both replaced by sharp angles and deep shadows. Her skin—still pale—seemed thin, impossibly fine and almost translucent, like rice paper, with little lines drawn in it that made it seem decades and not years since he’d last seen her. Her voice was different, the Liverpool lilt and inflections of her youth taken over by a roundness that coated her words with the dialect of a different place but not necessarily a specific one. She sounded rootless, neither here nor there but everywhere and all at once, in much the same way the people in charge of The Beatles’ careers—Brian and his people, the suits at EMI—had wanted them to sound when they’d first reached the capital. He didn’t like it, her lips and her tongue and the insides of her cheeks, because of the strange sounds they made when she spoke.

Still, while the distance between them narrowed as she stepped into his sphere to write down her address, John could feel Julia’s warmth, smell her perfume, and he ached for her. When the rain-turned-snowflakes that iced her hair and eyelashes dared to melt against her, he envied them their closeness. He realised he’d have given anything then to sink into her skin.

She finally pressed the piece of paper into the palm of John’s hand; her fingers flexed, squeezing his hand, and he closed his fingers around hers, desperate to keep contact. 

“This is the second time you’ve given me your address on a piece of notepaper,” John said. “Do you remember? Before Paris?”

Julia’s shy smile masked a note of embarrassment. She lowered her eyes. “Please drop in,” she hushed, changing the subject. “Anytime.”

He looked at her, trying to distinguish her level of seriousness, and found her intensity frightening. Her lips smiled at him but her eyes remained fixed, unemotional and sunken spots in a face creased with worry. He struggled to unravel her contradictions, just as he’d always done. _Some things never change…_

“Well, we’d better be off,” the man named Henry said.

Julia nodded and her visage changed, instantly, as though she’d been wearing a mask. She smiled more brightly and tilted her head lovingly to the side, and in a soft voice reserved for fare-thee-wells to the dearest of old friends, she spoke: “It was _so_ good to see you, John.”

“Yes,” was John’s reply. It was all he could manage through suddenly thick lips, struck half-mute by the intervening minutes’ conversation. He could do little else but hold her slate grey eyes as she smiled and turned, Henry’s arm holding her elbow stiffly at his side as they walked away.

John watched them until they disappeared at the end of the block, rounding a corner, suddenly gone from view. He’d forgotten almost entirely what he held in his hand; but a sharp folded corner had begun to dig into the fleshy pad at the base of his thumb, and he glanced down, and felt something approaching an out of body confusion, the same feeling he’d had in the dressing room earlier that night. He stared at the paper like it had no business being there; even his own fingers felt foreign. He was holding a hand grenade accidentally pulled; he wasn’t sure whether to throw it or let the incendiary blast consume him utterly. 

Back inside, George levelled a grin at John. “What, did you smoke a whole pack?” he asked.

John slid into the booth and very discreetly pulled his glasses out from the breast pocket of his coat. He slipped them on, striving for discretion, opened his hand, and unfolded the paper.

An address—33 Weymouth Mews—and a telephone number—John counted the digits to make sure it was legitimate—stared back at him, in blue-black ink flawlessly scrawled, perfectly legible, and unmistakably hers. He hadn’t dreamt it at all.

John folded the paper and handed it to George before quickly returning his glasses to his pocket.

“John Lennon, forgoing his vanity? Must be serious,” George quipped as he took the paper and unfolded it. He squinted at it, trying to make sense of what he saw. “What’s this?”

John rested both elbows on the table, steepling his fingers over his glass. “Yer never gonna believe it…”

* * *

Later that night, wrapped in the suburban London quiet and cognizant of the sleeping toddler not far away, John drifted through his house and into his bedroom where he expected to slip into bed next to his wife unnoticed. But Cynthia was awake, and reading. She smiled at him—an easy, natural smile, the only kind she knew how to deliver; Cynthia was, as ever, a beautifully poetic and open book—and put down her novel.

“I wasn’t expectin’ yeh back so soon.”  
John sighed and crossed the room. 

“Called it an early night,” he said. “I’m knackered.”

Cynthia opened the blankets and John crawled in, fully clothed, and rested his head on her belly. Her surprise at the tender gesture was evident in her voice as she whisper-sang his name; he heard the sound resonating in her body, beneath the cup of his ear.

“Is everything all right?” she asked him. She ran a hand through his hair, and John felt as though he could fall asleep and stay asleep for a decade or more. The thought calmed him; he shut his eyes and listened for her heartbeat.

“I ran into Julia tonight.”

Cynthia’s hand stopped. “Julia?” she asked. “Fitzpatrick?”

John opened his eyes and took a breath, in and out, that fluttered the fabric of her nightgown. “The one an’ only.”

Her hand picked up where it left off, fingernails gently raking across John’s scalp. He could hear the change in her pulse; the thrumming _thump-THUMP_ replaced by something erratic, frantic; less sure of where it stood. 

“Where?” she asked. “When?”

“‘Bout an hour ago, outside the Scotch,” he told her. “She was with a man. Odd bloke. Pompous.”

Cyn nodded—John could feel the movement even though he couldn’t see her. He didn’t like her silence, so he just continued to talk. 

“She’s livin’ ‘ere now. About a five minute walk from Paul, actually,” he snickered. “If that isn’t the very definition of small world, I don’t know what is…”  


He knew he was pushing now; Icarus flying too close to the convenient truth he wanted his wife to believe—that it had been innocent, that he hadn’t read into her embrace, that he wasn’t going to dream about her tonight right after he rubbed one out in the bathroom remembering a solitary two year-old kiss shared in a ground floor flat in Falkner Street. He was playing with fire, more than ever, but he couldn’t help himself.

“Maybe we should go over there,” John suggested. “You know—like old times?”

“This isn’t Liverpool, John,” she admonished him. “You know it can’t be like old times.”

John sighed. “You’re right.”

Cynthia was quiet; her hand stilled once more, holding back the fringe of John’s hair from his forehead. She slowly drew her hand back over his head, letting the hair fall back into place, skimming John’s eyebrows and the bridge of his nose, tickling him an inch away from a sneeze.

“Did you tell Paul?”

Cynthia’s cold reality check had been sobering; _this_ was gutting. John hadn’t thought about Paul, not once, the entire night. Now that she’d put it to him, voiced it, he couldn’t turn away. Not now that it was out there.

When his reply wasn’t immediately forthcoming, Cynthia provided the only answer he knew would work. “You ought to,” she said, her voice softening as she dripped her hebenon into his ear. 

He knew she was right. 

She reached over, dislodging John, and turned off her bedside lamp, pitching the room in semi-darkness—the light in the bathroom was on, diffusing across the room from the slightly cracked doorway.

John sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bed to begin undressing—tossing his jacket to the floor, pulling on the lower edge of his sweater, yanking it up and over his head, unbuttoning his trousers, down and over one leg, and then the other—until he was sitting there in his socks and underwear, staring at his stomach.

He poked a finger into his skin, just beside his navel, and then twice more on his hip, before looking over at the bathroom and thinking about the way Julia smelled and how her lips felt, tasted; sensations like that, he knew, would be burned into his memory for as long as he lived. When he looked back down at his stomach, his arousal clearly evident, he sighed and scrubbed a hand over his face.

_“What if I told you to lick my cunt?”_ she’d asked him once, in a voice burned along his auditory nerve, claiming squatter’s rights in his hippocampus. He leaned over and rested his head in his hands, elbows perched on his knees, staring at the floor.

“John?” 

He sat up and turned to look at Cyn behind him; without wanting to, he saw Julia’s face on hers. He shut his eyes as Cyn reached over and touched his arm, resting her fingers on his elbow.

“Come to bed.”

Without responding to anything she’d said, John closed his eyes, leaned over and kissed her. Deeply. She buried her fingers in his hair and he buried himself between her legs, and soon they were making love in the half-light, exorcising ghosts they never knew were haunting them in the first place.

* * *

_CYNTHIA: I never told John all that I knew about Julia—that I’d heard his conversation with her that night in Brian’s flat, or that I knew the real reason why he and Paul had beaten each other senseless—because I never thought we would see her again and I didn’t want to upset him needlessly with some kind of guilt-trip over it, not when there were much bigger things on his plate and mine. But hearing that he’d seen her, I just knew… it was going to happen again. All of it. And there was nothing I could do to stop it…_

* * *

JOHN: I suppose I could have kept that from her, but what purpose would that have served? I’d done nothing wrong. I’d stood up for Julia because of some misplaced sense of chivalry, and we'd shared one kiss. But suddenly I had loads of guilt and I didn’t know why or what to do about it. So I told Cyn and hoped it would go away, and of course it only made it worse because then I had to pretend that it was no big deal when in fact it was a big fucking deal. ( _Pause_ ) And then I didn’t exactly rush out and tell Paul, either, so…


	23. Swing and a Miss

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: "[Approaching Dawn](https://open.spotify.com/track/0MTdo7dVt0GWgUrs1sP7Yk?si=RQDQVB4uSw2vygs5mCx8Tg)"

* * *

MURPHY: Jane was very candid with us about—

PAUL: You spoke with Jane?

MURPHY: Yes, about a week and a half ago. ( _Pause_ ) I have the tapes and notes right here. I promise you there was nothing untoward about it.

PAUL: I’m just surprised. ( _Quietly_ ) She’s simply a very private person, that’s all.

MURPHY: But in spite of everything she still didn’t want anything bad to come to Julia, which is, I believe, why she spoke to us. Her concern was evident.

PAUL: ( _Sigh_ ) That’s very much like her. ( _Pause_ ) Well what did she say?

MURPHY: She described your relationship at that point in very positive terms… exciting, romantic—

* * *

_JANE: Paul was the absolute centre of my world at the time. He was kind, charming, gentlemanly. He was obviously very talented and passionate. Determined. And not just about the music, but about everything. If he wanted something, it didn’t take long before he got it. […] That was difficult to deal with at times. I was just a girl, a teenager really, and when you’re that old a gap of four years is a lifetime. He had so much more experience, and they were mobbed by women wherever they went. It wasn’t the easiest thing to juggle—staying true to what I wanted out of the relationship and what I was willing to give, while also making sure that the relationship was still there, because he could have very easily gone off …[…] I’d first heard about this girl from Liverpool very early on—Jules, they called her. I always assumed she’d been one of Paul’s girlfriends or had at least professed some kind of romantic interest, but that was never explicitly stated. That was really all I knew, and for the first year and a half of our courtship, it was all I needed to know…_

* * *

30 November 1964  
57 Wimpole Street  
Very early morning

Paul and Jane were able to use the front door to her parents’ Wimpole Street home that night for the first time in months by virtue of the fact that it was so late and the cold drizzle that had hung over the city all day had finally turned to a downpour and driven every last fan away from the step.

Had the typical gaggle of hangers-on stuck around, they would have been treated to a tipsy and tittering Paul and his slightly less-inebriated girlfriend, tumbling out of their chauffeured car, hushing their giggles but giggling nonetheless, arm-in-arm as they took turns pulling each other up the step, returning home from a night of drink and dance. With habitual urgency, Jane slipped the key into the lock and the pair spirited inside before they realised there was no need to hurry. They were alone, away from the fans, blissfully secreted.

Paul fancied the idea tremendously; he felt like a private citizen for the first time in years. Emboldened by the thought and the semi-darkness of the Asher foyer, and fuelled by drink and the joint he’d smoked in the toilet before they’d left the club, Paul’s took Jane by the hand and pulled her to him, catching her in his arms and surprising her with a kiss. Her eager response was still tempered, by her fear of waking her parents, asleep above their heads, and the lingering taste of marijuana that clung to his lips. His resolve, however, was tempered only by the knowledge that there was no decent surface on which to screw within their immediate vicinity.

And yet the embrace tightened, and the kiss deepened.

“Paul,” Jane whispered, breaking free from his lips as he moved to devour her slim neck. “Shouldn’t we…? Do you…?”

Paul knew his own ravenous answer without needing the question to be asked in full. He nuzzled her earlobe and groaned his response against her skin, tracing a line of kisses to the base of her throat and along her jawline as his hand sought her breast.

“Oh Paul…” she sighed, folding and pressing her body against the length of him. He would have begged her to let him take her right then—lack of space be damned—had the upstairs landing light not switched on, spilling itself into the foyer and shredding their intimacy with bladed precision.

“Jane, is that you dear?” her father called down.

Paul stepped away, backing into a wall sconce that hung at eye level behind him; he hoped that the tinny _thud!_ followed by his own hissed expletive hadn’t travelled up the winding stairway. He held the back of his head; Jane smoothed her hair and ran her hands down the rumpled front of her shirt dress. “Yes, it’s us,” she replied, hiding her mild intoxication with a chipper lilt in her voice.

“Good evening, sir,” Paul added. Jane sighed, pressing the back of her hand to her mouth.

“Evening, Paul,” came the reply. “Jane, dear, have the girls gone? Would you mind shutting off the front light if they have?”

“Yes of course,” she said, reaching over to flick the switch; Paul noticed through the decorative glass atop the door that the light on the stoop outside went dark. Goodnights were exchanged, but as her father went back to bed, the landing light—unlike the front porch light—stayed on, spilling down the stairs, anathema to their romantic mood. The moment was ruined.

Jane shrugged halfheartedly at Paul. “I’m sorry.”

Paul deflated. “We need our own place.”

“Paul…” she breathed, crossing the threshold of an argument they’d had a hundred times since Paul had first moved into the home. Of course Paul enjoyed living with the Asher family, for many reasons that weren’t his proximity to the auburn-haired beauty standing in front of him. But in moments like this, when their privacy took a backseat to propriety and lust was absolutely out of the question, Paul found himself desperate to pack up and move to just about anywhere else, as long as it was four walls he could call his, where he and Jane could do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. _In every single goddamned room,_ he thought ruefully, _and_ _on every piece of furniture, at all hours of the day or night…_

Jane was different, happy as ever to stay near her family and eager to make their living arrangement work. Paul secretly wondered if her reticence to take the relationship further was a ploy to encourage him to ask her to marry him, but it never lasted long enough for Paul to follow through and actually ask her.

This night, however, as he stood in the half-light, an eager erection pressing painfully and obviously against his inseam, he seriously considered dropping to one knee right there. Maybe it was the excitement of the last year, the way everything seemed to be going so well, or the fact that he was less than a week out from his father’s second marriage—all of which had put domesticity front and centre as something he craved and desperately believed he’d earned.

He stepped towards her and gripped her arms in his hands. “I just want a place that’s ours, that’s all. I love it here. I love your family. I just—”

She smiled, sweetly. “Why don’t we talk about this tomorrow?”

He sighed and nodded, and the nod turned into a yawn, and suddenly he felt as though he could sleep for a hundred years. “Are you going to bed?” he asked.

“I think so,” she combed three fingers through her long hair. “You?”

He shrugged. “Probably.”

“Okay.”

Paul sighed and began his ascent; Jane trudged at his heels.

As had become their custom, he walked her to her bedroom door and no further. There, he rested his hands on her arms as he leaned in and gave her a chaste good night kiss, on the cheek. “If you leave your window open a crack…” he whispered against her skin.

Jane giggled. “Not tonight, Paul,” she told him as she pulled away, arching her back away from him. He shut his eyes and groaned. “You’ll survive.”

Paul sighed. “Good night, then.”

“Paul?”

He had already turned and was heading toward the stairs again, up to his attic floor bedroom. “Hm?”

She sighed, a sad smile on her lips as she shrugged off her coat. “Sleep well.”

“Same to you,” he replied, a soft smile on his lips. Then he dragged his way up to the very top floor. Inside, he tossed his jacket on the end of his bed. In the quiet that surrounded him, his head stuck out the open window, he smoked the last of a joint produced from his inside breast pocket. From out of the corner of his eye, he saw the landing light flicker out beneath the closed door to his room; turned off, surely, by the hawk-eyed family patriarch, who knew exactly what he was doing.

Paul sighed and finished up; then, with a heavy and unsatisfied sigh, he shut the window and crawled into bed, where he tossed and turned all night to the sounds of London just beyond his window pane.

* * *

PAUL: It was all still so new, and now we had money and we were living in London, in the very lap of luxury, but it was a hurricane and there were four of us at the centre of it, so naturally we grew even closer than we’d been before. If something happened to one of us—like George getting sick our first day in America—it was amplified and dispersed at the same time because there were four of us to handle the load. So Ringo’s tonsil surgery was a big deal. We had our driver pick us up separately and we made our way over. John had picked out a couple of balloons and George had a naughty card that he signed for us. It was just good, silly fun.

MURPHY: And this is when John first told you?

PAUL: That’s right. The day before Ringo went in. ( _Pause_ ) An odd topic of conversation for a day such as that…


	24. Not Happy Like I Used to Be

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: "[Baby Love](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB1bTtt1his)"

* * *

30 November 1964  
Whaddon House

“You know you lads didn’t have to go and do this,” Ringo said, genuinely sheepish as he sank back into the sofa. “It’s just a tonsillectomy.”

“It’s not like it was any trouble, Richie,” John put on a voice.

“We found the balloons in a rubbish bin out back,” George chirped, flicking one of the helium-filled monstrosities with his finger. It bounced off of Paul’s head; he made a mocking fist and grinned before looking down at his fingernail, which he had been picking at since they’d arrived.

“’S hard to imagine how we got here, you know?” Paul said.

George got serious. “You were driven, Paul,” he said. “We have a driver. ‘Bout yay high. Wears a silly hat, drives a big black car?” He put his hand on Paul’s shoulder. “Are you feeling okay?”

John tittered, and Paul rolled his eyes.

“I was goin' somewhere with this, fellas,” he said. “You know, that we wouldn’t be here at all if it ‘adn’t been fer Ring joinin’ the band an’ all.”

“Aw, come on,” Ringo waved his hand.

“He’s right,” George said with a nod.

“And that, my friend, is why we came to visit,” Paul added.

John put the full stop on the conversation. “And that’s all there is to it.”

Ringo grinned. “That’s really lovely of yeh t’ say. Honest.”

“Right, now don’t go getting all blubbery,” John warned.

“Right, right,” Ringo ran a hand over his hair with a sigh. “I wish I didn’t have to go in. But it helps, all this.”

The four of them were quiet for a moment before Ringo chimed in once more.

“Y’know, I probably shouldn’t even tell yeh this, but I saw the charts fer this week when I was out today..."

Paul felt the tiniest flutter of excitement at Ringo's words, but they quickly dropped away; top of the charts, while once quite thrilling, had become rather mundane—no longer the source of great pride, each week a song or album of theirs remained in the top spot was simply one more week at the top out of dozens. But Paul had to be honest with himself; he couldn't remember the last time he'd looked at the charts at all. They hadn't released any music recently, and were a week out from their next album being put on store shelves. It was possibly they weren't even on the charts. 

 _Though_ , Paul thought,  _stranger things have happened..._

As if reading his mind, John made a face. “Are we number one again?” he groaned, and they shared a collective groan that turned into a laugh.

Ringo shook his head. "Not even close," he said. "The Supremes. 'Baby Love'."

Paul chuckled as George began to sing the chorus, and before long John and Ringo had joined in as well. 

"I guess it's back to the Pool for us then," George said. "Washed up. Finished."

“I’d say we should celebrate but I don’t think there’s anything fancy kickin’ around,” Ringo said, a beat before George got up to rummage through the cupboard that held the alcohol.

“Lime cordial?” he murmured. “Since when did we stock lime cordial…?”

“It’s probably Mo’s,” Ringo said, going to the kitchen for four tumblers. George stuck his hand into the back of the cupboard and produced a bottle of Canadian Club gifted to them by some civic ambassador or another during their stopover in Vancouver that summer.

“‘Ey I wondered where that went…” Paul chirped as George opened the slightly dusty bottle and handed it to Ringo, who poured out an equal amount into each glass before topping them off with Coke.

“Two fingers,” John said, holding his index and pinky fingers apart in front of him. “Neat.”

“Trouble at home?” Paul joked.

“You could say that…” John shrugged.

“Aw, come on Johnny,” George grinned. “It’s not trouble with Cyn and you know it.”

John made a face and reached for his glass, but George wasn’t finished. The youngest Beatle turned to Paul with a knowing grin plastered on his face.

“Did ‘e mention who he ran into last night?” he asked with a conspiratorial jab of an elbow into Paul's ribcage.

John shot George a damning look, one that Paul caught in his peripheral. “Who’d you run into, John?” he asked as he tipped his glass back, noticing—with no small amount of annoyance—that his hand was trembling.

John took one look at Paul before averting his eyes, and Paul knew. George didn't need to say it; Paul could  _feel_ it.

“Julia Fitzpatrick,” George laughed. “Outside the Scotch of St. James, of all places…”

The fizzy mix fell back against Paul's tongue and he held it there, letting it burn. His eyes began to sting, but they never left John’s face, even as John kept his eyes focused on the floor in front of him.

“Julia?” Paul asked finally as she swallowed his gulp full.

George lost his grin. “Oh, he really didn’t tell you?”

“No, I didn’t fuckin’ tell ‘im,” John said finally, gulping back a mouthful from his own glass.

“Were you going to?” Paul demanded.

John met his eyes, and Paul could see his sincerity as he cocked his head to the side, slightly, and murmured his response. “‘Course I was,” he said. “Just waitin’ for the right time is all.”

Paul harrumphed and took another gulp of his drink, finishing it off. “When would that’ve been?”

“Well I’m tellin’ you know, okay Paul?” John returned. “Me an’ George went out for drinks and there she was, on the arm of some doctor… Henry Carter. Smug, holier-than-thou, pompous…”

“What did you talk about?”

“Escalating tensions in Vietnam,” John quipped. “We spoke for about two minutes and then she and the Professor went on their way. ‘Ad a show to catch.”

Ringo put the bottle of rye on the table and, in an attempt to defuse the tension, flipped the switch on the radio; the song that came through the tinny little speakers was none other than that week's number one hit, and Ringo's shock showed on his face as he began to sing again. “ _Tell me what did I do wrong... to make you stay away so long..."_

He tried to rope George into the song, but was unsuccessful. While Ringo continued to hop around a little, singing the words he did know, George stared between John and Paul. "I really didn't know."

"It's fine."

Paul tuned it all out—Ringo's caterwauling, a remorseful George, silent John. He stared at the carbonated bubbles popping at the surface of his drink, breaking the stillness of the dark liquid just enough that he never got his full reflection in it before another bubble or ten erupted. _Julia… ._ He hadn’t thought about her in years.

“So she’s living here?”

John nodded. “Yeah.”

“Where?”

“Weymouth Mews."

 _Jesus Christ!_ Paul groaned inwardly. “You mean all this time she’s been five minutes from my front door?”

John shrugged. “I guess so.”

Paul downed what was left in his glass. “I want to go see her.”

“Paul, that’s not how this is gonna work,” John said.

"Oh, no?" 

Tension ratcheted. Ringo stopped dancing and turned the radio down; the room was pitched into a venomous silence, broken only by a loud bang from somewhere on the street outside and the sound of two yelling voices down below.

“So how then?” Paul quipped.

“I don’t know.”

Ringo finally took a step into the little circle that had formed. “Look... I didn't know Julia very well—hardly knew her at all—but she must have been something special to make you two go spare over her the way you did," he said. "But that was then. And I think you two need to step back and figure this out now before you go running headlong into something that we all know ended very badly the last time around.”

George was in agreement. “If you two start stroppin’ over Jules again, it’ll be picked up and run with in newspapers all over the world,” he said.

“Just think what Brian’d do t’ yeh,” Ringo continued. “Or how it’ll affect the girls.”

 _The girls_ , Paul groaned. "Oh, the fans'll be fine. They got used to Cynthia, didn't they? They don't mind Jane or Mo or Pattie—"

"He's not talking about _the fans_ Paul," John said. "He's _talking about_ Cynthia and Jane..."

Paul took a calming breath, releasing it as a long sigh. He knew they were right; he had no idea if any of this was even worth fighting over. It had been years— _Well, two years_ , he thought; _two momentous years_. She’d be twenty one now. She could be married. She could have kids. There was no telling what he’d be getting into if he re-entered her life; this wasn’t the time to be testing his sense of adventure. And Ringo was right—he had a lot more to consider. Fans. The press. A girlfriend, in whose family home he was living.

Five minutes away from Julia’s door…

“Besides which—” Ringo lifted his glass, which he had filled again with more rye. “I might die on the operatin’ table, and I wouldn’t want a fight to mark off the last Beatles meeting.”

John laughed. “No one dies from havin’ their tonsils out, Ring.”

“Not in England, anyway,” George chimed in.

Ringo tipped his glass in an toast—“God bless the National Health!”—and it was left to Paul to step up and demand a refill; George followed, and then John, and with rye in their glasses, they lifted them and _‘clinked_ ’, smiles—however forced—on their faces.

“To happiness,” George said.

“And friends,” Paul added.

“Long lost or otherwise,” said John.

He and Paul locked eyes as they drank; it wasn’t a challenge, but an understanding.

This time, things were going to be different.


	25. Best Laid Plans

Chapter Soundtrack: "[Walk, Don't Run](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WW21rcHiVU0)" / "[Champagne and Quail](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9qva4Q6Z_0)" 

JOHN: I had her contact info burning a hole in my pocket, and with the news out there anyway, I figured I should just ring her up and get it over with. We were going to have a week or more off, I thought, with Ringo and his recovery and all that. It seemed like a good time for us to meet up. ( _Pause_ ) I mean, it was total shit timing, but if it had to happen, happening on a week off was about as good as it was going to get, I thought…

* * *

1 December 1964  
Kenwood

John picked up the phone, staring at the numbers on the paper, but as he dialled the first three digits, his hand began to sweat and he slammed the phone back into the cradle with a shake of his head.

He sat down in the chair beside the phone and picked up the phone. This time he got six digits in before giving up.

“Get a fuckin’ grip…” he swore to himself, shaking his hand. _It’s a phone call. You’re a grown man, not a lovesick teenager. You’re a fuckin’ Beatle, fer chrissakes. Pick up the damn phone and call her…_

The pep talk worked. He made it through the whole number, and when the dead space on the other end became a ring tone, his heart thudded in his ears and he almost lost his grip on the receiver. But he was committed, and strangely and calmly resigned. There were three rings before the pick-up.

“Hello?”

He cleared his throat. “Yeah, hi. It’s John.”

Silence. John panicked; he glanced at the digits, hoping he’d dialled properly, hadn’t transposed a 7 for a 9 and accidentally got a mother of four in some two-up two-down in Croydon on the line instead of the person he was hoping for.

Then she talked. “I didn’t think you’d actually ring.”

John’s relief manifested audibly as a sigh; he hoped she hadn’t heard it. “Are you glad I did?”

After a pause, Julia replied. “Yes.”

“Good.”

More silence. John wondered what he was expecting and suddenly felt very foolish for telephoning in the first place.

“How are you?”

“Fine,” he said. “Ringo’s having his tonsils out.”

“I read about that.”

“How are you?”

“Tired,” she said. “I only just woke up.”

John glanced at the clock; it was a quarter past one in the afternoon. He grinned. “Burnin’ the midnight oil?”

“You could say that.”

John leaned back in his chair, cautiously relaxed. “How are things?”

“Did you really ring me up fer small talk, John?”

He bristled. “Well why did yeh give me yer number, then?” he barked. “What the hell else _should_ I be talkin’ about? How about where the fuck ‘ave you been? You want me to start there?”

“It’s the truth, isn’t it?” she replied. “It’s what you want to know.”

He sighed again.

“I don’t think I should tell you anyway,” she said.

“And why not?”

“‘Cos it’s not exactly fair to Paul, is it?”

 _Paul_. John shut his eyes. “Yeah.”

“I would like to see you both,” she said.

“We’re having a bit of a break now,” John nodded as he replied. “Fer a week or so.”

“I see,” she said.

When she didn’t continue, John pushed. “Aren’t you going to invite me over?”

“When do you _want_ to come over?”

“Tonight.”

A pause. “I can’t.”

“Tomorrow then?”

“Mm-mm, sorry,” she said, “I have plans.”

John’s anger simmered to near boiling. He jabbed a finger across his eyelid in frustration. “Why did you ask _me_ to pick a day, Julia, when you’re the one with the packed social calendar?”

She paused again. “How about Friday?”

John sneered. “You and Professor Higgins don’t ‘ave a date then?”

He squeezed his eyes shut, wishing he’d caught that one before it tripped out of his mouth; on the other end, he heard nothing but silence. He waited for the click, fully expecting her to hang up.

Her reply was cautious and studied. “I thought I was making one now. With you.”

John nodded. “Friday night?”

“And I’d like to see Paul.”

John wondered if he’d be able to convince Paul to go on such short notice. _The London bachelor, his West End girlfriend, and their Soho party pals are apt to have already booked soirees enough to fill a calendar year,_ he thought with a harsh mental kick, scolding himself for being so cynical. If John asked, Paul would be there. It was as simple as that.

“All right, Fitzpatrick.”

“All right, Lennon.”

He chuckled. “Julia?”

“Yeah?”

A pause. “It is really good t’ hear yer voice, you know.”

“Well forgive me for saying that it really doesn’t feel like I ever left you lot,” she said. “All I hear, all I see, every day…Beatles, Beatles, Beatles.”

John replied with a soft laugh.

“You’re everywhere,” she said. “It hasn’t been easy.”

“No, I can imagine.”

“But maybe now…” and she let her words trail off. John sighed and felt himself caving, again, like he’d done all those years before.

“Until Friday,” he said.

“Yes,” she replied. “Goodbye.”

He replaced the phone and leaned back in his chair again, staring up at the ceiling, while he added up the hours between where he was and Friday night.

* * *

JOHN: So I waited… mostly curious, to tell you the truth, but there was a part of me that really felt lit up but the whole thing. I was unhappy you know. Had been for a while. This seemed like the shot in the arm that my pathetic existence needed to jumpstart itself.

WILSON: At that point, what did you see happening?

JOHN: I don’t know. I didn’t care. That was how bad it was getting for me—a fucking phone call could make things a million times better.

WILSON: Were you worried at all about Paul, perhaps rekindling his romance?

JOHN: ( _pause_ )I didn’t dare think about it…

* * *

PAUL: John set it all up. I was pissed off about that, too, because it felt so sneaky and underhanded, but I suppose that’s because I was in the dark and he held all the cards. For the first time, I was the outsider. I didn’t like it.

MURPHY: When did you find out that you were going over?

PAUL: If I remember correctly, he gave me about six hours’ notice, and I almost told him where to stick it except he was being so cryptic and there was always something exciting about being with John when he was like that—you’ve got to understand that for all the bluster and bravado that might say otherwise, I adore that man, and I wanted to be around him, you know, to be with him. His friendship meant everything. So it really was nothing to cancel the plans I’d had with Jane.

MURPHY: What did you tell her?

PAUL: ( _pause_ ) Half-truths.

MURPHY: Lying already?

PAUL: ( _scoff_ ) Yeah, right?

* * *

4 December 1964  
57 Wimpole Street

“Well when will you be home?”

Paul shrugged into his coat and looked at Jane. “Late, probably.”

She held her hands in front of her; in her floral dress, a wide headband holding back her flame-red hair, she looked like a child. “I don’t understand. What can be done tonight that can’t be done tomorrow?”

Paul shrugged, feeling himself on the edge of a string of lies he wasn’t sure he could contain if he let them go much farther. “Well, the album was released today, you know? This is just John being John,” he said, surprising himself with the lengths he was able to go to so quickly, how easy it was to lie. “He’s gonna obsess over things that can’t be changed, you know. It’s not going to be all that much fun, really.”

She chewed her lip. “You’ll be at his place?”

Again, he shrugged. “I’m meeting him at the studio. He might have been able to get time in, I don't know. One of the listening rooms or something.”

She nodded and shrugged, wrapping her arms around herself. “You won’t mind terribly if I continue with our plans then and go to the show without you?”

Paul bristled; his preference was that she didn’t go out, not without him. He thought about the press, the way they’d spin that story— _Beatle Girl Goes Solo_ or something. He thought about who she’d run into, fans and people who’d seen her face in the papers and on the television. Boys who’d try and get her to smile at them…

“You know what that will be like if you go alone, right?”

She flipped her hair coolly over her shoulder, affecting disinterest that Paul saw through the instant she presented it. “I know,” she chirped. “But I told my friends I would, and just because you’re not going, that doesn’t mean—”

Paul shrugged. He knew he wasn’t exactly in the right place to be making demands— _Where, exactly, are you heading once you climb into the car, McCartney?_ —so he backed off, passive-aggression intact. “Fine, do what you’d like,” he said. “I’m not going to stand in your way.”

“You’re not,” she replied. “Standing in my way, that is.”

“Good,” was his reply, feeling annoyance at her flippancy prickling the back of his neck.

“I don’t like fighting with you.”

“Who’s fighting?”

Jane cocked her head to the side, waiting for more. When he said nothing, she shifted her weight, impatiently. “Is that all you’re going to say?”

Paul checked his watch and then the window, where he saw the car waiting for him. “I’ve been lookin’ at houses.”

Jane sighed. “Paul…”

“I’m not pushin’ yeh, all right?” he said. “I—Brian thinks it’s a good idea, an investment. George is lookin’ too. Might be time to really consider it.”

She didn’t seem impressed, though her tone had shifted; she seemed contrite, almost. “You’re serious?”

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

“I just…” she sighed again. “I just think we have a lot of time, don’t we? Why do we have to rush this?”

“I didn’t ask you to shack up, did I?” Paul checked his watch again. “And besides, I don’t think we’re rushin’. I think we’re _stallin’_ and I can’t fer the life of me figure out why.”

“Perhaps you forget that I’m four years younger than you?”

“Well since you _never_ seem to forget it…”

“Paul,” she said, a solemn reprimand that began and ended on his name.

He shook his head again. “You ask me to treat you like an adult when it’s convenient, and then when it’s not, it’s back to this…”

Jane seemed upset, but her words told a different story as she smoothed over the truth with the practiced patina of patient concern and curiosity. _Saying one thing and meaning another_ , he thought, sick to death of trying to decipher and separate the two.

“Look, John’s waitin’.”

She nodded. “Right.” Then she crossed the foyer and placed a kiss against the corner of his lips. “I’ll see you later then?”

“Yes.”

“Right.”

Paul nodded, not sure why he was feeling so guilty, and shoved a hand into his pocket while he opened the door and stepped out onto the stoop. A small contingent of fans had gathered around the gate, especially excited since the arrival of the chauffeured car, which could only mean that one or more Beatles might already be inside; the dozen of them stood against the windy cold with gloved hands outstretched, thrusting notepads to be autographed, their fingers on his coat. Hiding a dramatic sigh behind his wide smile, he waved at the crowd and then hunkered down, signing what he could before his own hand threatened to go numb, and finally ducking into the backseat of the car.

“Part of me thought you might have changed yer mind,” John drawled as Paul sat down on the bench seat opposite him, flicking his cigarette out the door before Paul shut it, much to the squealing delight of the girls outside.

“You could’ve gone.”

John reached over and jokingly smoothing Paul’s hair, which had been tousled mightily by the gales.

“Fuck off.” Paul swatted him away.

John made a face, shoving his tongue against the inside of his lower lip and pulling a face before smiling. “‘E used t’ be such a nice boy!” he crowed, his voice pitched high, crone-like, as he leaned back against the seat. “Bleedin’ fame’s got to ‘is ‘ead, it ‘as.”

Paul allowed a small smile as he watched his friend pull out a joint and light it, cracking the window for ventilation as the car pulled away from the curb. John inhaled, holding his breath for a moment before blowing a steady stream of acrid smoke out the window and handing the joint to Paul, who puffed twice and leaned back.

“Christ,” Paul said, his head on the headrest. “I don’t even know if I want to go anymore…”

“That’s the spirit!” John joked, punching Paul in the knee. “Christ, if I’d wanted to have this much fun I would’ve pulled up a cot next to Ringo. I could spoon feed ‘im his ice cream, flirt with the bird the next bed over, maybe ‘ave a fling with a head nurse named Bertha.” He held out his hands, indicating the imagined woman’s imagined girth as he puffed out his cheeks. Then he let go and stared out the window.

Paul sighed and handed the cigarette back to John. “Look, I’m sorry.”

John considered him before taking a drag. “What’re you and the missus fightin’ about this time?”

This time Paul shrugged. “Same old.”

“What to name the twins?”

Paul chuckled. “I think you actually have to be able to _make_ the babies first.”

John flashed a Paul a knowing, sympathetic look before brushing it off with humour, as he so often did. “Is that how it works?” he scratched his head. “And to think, all these years, Cyn and I’ve been lyin’ around, fully clothed, waitin’ fer this nice big family to drop in down the chimney…”

“Yeah, right,” Paul snorted, and John managed a chuckle as he passed the joint back to Paul, who took another deep inhale before handing it back. “You know, the last time Jane and I were together, I nearly broke my neck climbing over the balcony railing to get out of her room before her parents came up the stairs.” He propped his elbow up on the door handle and slunk low in the seat. “Christ, I’m sick and tired of havin’ it off by myself. What’s the point of a girlfriend if you can’t even shag ‘er properly? The walls between the rooms are paper thin, John! Door mice make more noise than we’re allowed to, I swear…”

“Clearly you’ve never ‘eard door mice goin’ at it,” John _tsked_.

Paul smoothed a hand over his hair in an ultimately futile attempt to set it back to rights. He glanced at John, who was staring out the window. “Are we good then?”

“‘Bout what?”

“This,” he said. “Where we’re goin’. _Her_.”

John shrugged. “I guess it all depends on what happens when we get there.”

Paul shivered. “I don’t even know what I’ll say to her,” he said.

John _hmm’d_ and settled back into the seat.

They’d barely relaxed into the seats and their driver was already slowing down and coming to a stop; that’s how pathetically close they’d been to one another. Paul felt a thousand butterflies rear up within his gut, threatening nausea. He tapped a frantic beat on his knee with the pads of his left hand. John, in possession of the joint, pressed the tip between his guitar-callused finger and thumb to stub it out and replaced it in his pocket.

“She’s different,” John said finally. “She _looks_ different. The same, sort of, but not really.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I didn’t recognise her.”

The butterflies intensified. _What does that mean?_ Paul wondered. _Is she fat? Did she lose her hair?_

“She _sounds_ different too.” He looked at Paul. “She’s not the same little girl.”

“How do you know all this from five minutes of conversation?”

John ignored the question. “I’m tellin’ you this as a friend and as someone who fancied ‘er once too: don’t be a surly dick tonight.”

Paul had a flash of remembrance—a cold December night, a small bed in a small room, a ghastly confession—and shook his head. “What? I’d never—”

“Just be kinder than you might want to be. None of this entitled jealousy bullshit that you like to pull.”

“John…”

John paused, only for a moment, to consider what he’d say before deciding instead to say nothing; his eyes focused on the floor of the car before he opened the door and slid out, checking for fans who might have followed them on foot. Paul followed, stepping into the cobbled alleyway in front of a row of mews houses and garage doors.

John was jittery; Paul could see that much. He huddled inside his coat and gave instructions to their driver to circle the block, doubling back if necessary, in order to confuse any fans who might still be trying to pick up their trail. Then he made his way across the mews and down a few doors until he came to stand in front of number 33. Paul took in his surroundings—sheltered from the wind, the narrow cobbled alleyway contained nothing of interest; as far as he knew, mews were filled with bedsits and parking garages for the wealthy front street owners; they were, as the year previous had shown him, places where people went to do dirty deeds in dark corners where the rest of London society wasn’t likely to see them. _Unless you’re a member of Her Majesty’s government spilling state secrets to the Ruskies through your girlfriend,_ Paul thought with a barely concealed laugh. But as he looked around him at the alleyway and its darkened windows, he realised that _this_ was positively charming. Even John seemed taken aback, standing in front of a pale blue door set into a wall of rough stones painted to match, presumably demarcating the dimensions where the house began and ended; Paul figured on about twelve feet wide. There was a small window set in the wall beside the door; soft light filtered through sheer curtains. Looking up, Paul saw more windows above him, set into walls painted blue, and wondered if it could really all be Julia’s.

“Are you sure this is the right address?”

John reached for the knocker, tapped it twice, and waited. “One way to find out.”

“Christ,” Paul shoved his hands into his pocket. “And if it’s not hers, then—”

“Then whoever answers the door is gonna get a face full of Beatle, aren’t they?”

Paul ignored John, focusing on the movement silhouetted through the curtains. “I mean, what could she possibly be doing for a living to be able to afford _this?_ ” he breathed.

“Don’t be a fuckin’ git.”

Paul spun around. “Fuck, John!” he raised his voice. “What in the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means be nice.”

“ _You_ be nice.”

Again, John made a face. “Aren’t I always?”

The latch sounded and the door swung open, and Paul saw the whole thing as if it were happening in slow motion—the soft light spilling out from within, spreading on the short stoop, blocked by her frame as she stood in front of them. The door was half open before he even registered her face.

But there she was.

She held the door open with one arm outstretched, a lit cigarette held aloft between her first two fingers. The other hand rested awkwardly on her hip: upside down, thumb pointing towards her belly, fingers splayed downward. She looked like she hadn’t expected the knock, had been scratching an itch in her lower back when she went to answer the door, and was now frozen like that.

Finally she smiled, letting go of the door and bending her elbow until her hand touched her brow. Ash from the cigarette dropped from the tip like snow and she blew a stream of air from her mouth to dislodge the flakes from her eyelashes and the delicate eyebrow-grazing fringe of her hair.

Julia breathed. “Hello fellas.”

Just like that, as if no time at all had passed.


	26. Ill Met By Moonlight

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: "[The Girl From Ipanema](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PYKOo_jgJo)" / "[Tequila](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3H6amDbAwlY)" / "[No Reply](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgFo9STa70E)" / "[Sleepwalk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBRCvVpknvg)"

* * *

“Jesus…” Paul mouthed, before closing the gap between them and wrapping his arms around her shoulders, pulling her close.

“Paul!” Julia cried, but before she could protest he felt her arms go around him, and as she returned the embrace, it was clear that her feeling was the same as his. He breathed her in, and she laughed. “It’s lovely to see you too.”

“Christ, Julia,” he intoned. “How have you been?”

She nodded, stepping out of his arms. “Um… busy.”

_ Busy?  _ “That’s it?” he asked. “Two years and you’ve just been  _ busy _ ?”

With a casual shrug, Julia met his eyes. “What do you want me to say?”

_ That you’d been lost at sea or trapped on the other side of the Berlin Wall or abducted by aliens! _ Paul thought. “Where’ve you been?”

“Around,” she nodded, glancing up and down the street. “Wouldn’t you like to come in?”

“Love to,” John interrupted, pushing past Paul on his way inside. Paul followed close behind, his eyes on Julia the entire time, not daring to let her out of his sight, as if the moment she did might be the moment she was spirited away again. John was right, she was different—her hair was darker, returned to its natural chestnut from the unnatural blonde he remembered, and it was far longer, reaching about midway down her back. Her skin looked—impossibly—paler than usual; she had bags under her eyes but still she wore the face of a model, made-up to mod-perfection: kohl-darkened and stiletto lashed eyes, pale pink lipstick, the works. Even her clothing seemed to have been selected from a fashion magazine—a long, shapeless top that skimmed her body down to her upper thighs, in brown with white polka dots, over cropped white pants entirely too summery for the weather outside, as if she were wearing a costume instead of clothing, as if this were part of some put-on. Which it might very well have been; Paul was enamoured but on guard. When she moved, the bangles on her arm jangled; she laughed as they passed through the short entry hall and into the sparsely decorated front room. Paul felt his heartbeat quicken as the spell began to work all over again; this time he actively fought its magnetism.

“Would you like something to drink?” she asked.

“Yes,” they both replied, in unison, and she laughed again but flitted off down to the other end of the long room, which held a kitchen Paul could just barely see in the dim light. Somewhere out of sight, coming from the stairwell leading up into unseen rooms, the soft sound of Brazilian bossa nova poured out of what Paul could only assume was a record player hidden above his head. For a brief moment, Paul wondered if he was feeling reality or if it was just the joint doing its thing in his central nervous system; his sudden paranoia made his stomach pitch. He lowered his voice below the volume of the soft  jabbed John in the side with his elbow.

“Fuckin’ ‘ell!” John cried.

“Sssh!” Paul hissed.

“So keep goin’ ‘round with them knifepoint elbows, why don’tcha?”

Paul allowed a small grin; his apprehension ebbed. “You said she looked different. You didn’t say she was—”

“Well, she is isn’t she?” John said.

“I’m what?”

They both turned to look as she stepped out of the shadows from the kitchen, with a bottle and three mismatched shot glasses in her arms.

“Here,” John said. “You’re here, and you’re—”

“Radiant,” Paul filled in the last descriptor.

Julia blushed. “Ta.”

They stood there, silent, in the vast space she called home, like ants in a cavern. Finally, she motioned with a tip of her head toward the furniture arranged in the nook by the small front window. John sat first, on one end of the small sofa. Paul sat beside him. Julia stood in front of the chair opposite, setting the glasses and the bottle on the round coffee table between them. 

As she did, she shimmied her shoulders. “Da-na-na-na-nah nah nah…” she sang as she turned the bottle so they could see the label. “Tequila,” she purred.

Here, Paul gave an involuntary shudder, partly owing to his distaste for tequila and partly because he felt his defenses weakening; Julia’s smile, the gleam in her grey eyes, the glint of the scar on her chin—lit by reflected light—as she threw her head back and laughed… the old equation was written out in full and it added up to the same problem as before, and Paul was nearing helplessness again as he sat tingling on the small sofa.

Julia’s giggle trailed off as she struck a pose—hands clasped above her head, raising one leg off the ground—and lowered her voice. “I now declare the… umpteenth meeting of Merseyside’s Finest One and Only Association for Motherless Vagrants and No-Goodniks and Old Time Supper Club, on this, the fourth day of December, nineteen-hundred-and-sixty-four, open.”

John chuckled. “Ah, atta girl!” 

Paul didn’t register his amusement. Julia started pouring drinks—filling each shot glass with the pale liquid.

“I’m not drinkin’ that,” Paul said.

“Aw come on, son,” John nudged him. “It’ll put hair on yer chest.”

Julia smiled. “It’s not terrible. See?” she asked as she picked up one glass and knocked it back, then poured another, which she dispatched just as quickly. “It’s quite nice, actually.”

Paul could hear traces of a posh accent on her tongue; she sounded more like Jane now, less like Julia. It didn’t suit her. He wrinkled his nose. “What is this accent you’re carryin’ on with?”

Julia stiffened. “What kind of a question is that?”

“I mean: what are you doing here?” he asked.

She seemed bemused. “I live here, Paul.”

He grumbled. “Not long enough to have lost Liverpool, I reckon.”

John shot him a glance—he was clearly in violation of the “Don’t be a dick” policy. But suddenly Paul didn’t really care. The vitriol rose, unbidden, against the conscious will he attempted to exert to keep it at bay.

“If that’s a roundabout way of asking me how long I’ve been living here, then… it’ll be two years on Christmas Day. That’s when I moved in.”

Paul did the math, and suddenly felt his blood boiling. “That means you bolted from Liverpool and pretty much  _ immediately _ moved here?” he asked.

Julia cocked her head, lost in thought. “I suppose that’s true.”

“Two years doesn’t seem like that long,” John said.

Paul scowled at him. “It’s a lifetime. Look at everything we’ve done in two years! Where were we two years ago?” He looked back at Julia, unable to contain his frustration, which suddenly erupted out of him. “Two years is a fucking long time.”

“What did I tell you on the step, Paul?” John scolded. “Quit being a bastard, sit there nicely, and ‘ave a drink.”

As he said it, he lifted the shot glass in front of him and drank it. Julia smiled, and Paul felt intense discomfort pressing in on him from all corners of the suddenly too-small living room.

“This was a mistake,” Paul said, standing up, giving up. 

Julia also got to her feet. “Don’t go.”

“Why? I just don’t know what we’re supposed to do here,” Paul continued. “You think we can just pick up right where we left off?”

Her smile softened but didn’t disappear. “I believe I left you and John beatin’ the livin’ daylights out of each other in a library stairwell—” she said, as John cut her off with a burst of laughter that stopped as soon as it started. She smiled. “I mean, if  _ you _ want to pick up where you left off be my guest, but you wouldn’t  _ really  _ want to mess up yer pretty mugs now, would you?”

Paul set his jaw, unimpressed with two years of revisionism he’d just been slapped with. “Actually, you left us both on an airport runway, bags in our hands, with a promise that you’d see us when we got back.”

Julia sighed, deeply, and grabbed the bottle to fill her shot glass again. “That was a long time ago.” 

“But you just said—”

But she downed the contents of the glass in one fluid movement before sloppily filling it again, and Paul watched, mesmerized, as she tipped her glass back and drank her fourth shot, with alarming swiftness, before briefly considering and finally drinking the last glass, the one she’d poured for him, still sitting full on the table top. 

“You might want to slow down there, lassie,” John drawled.

“I don’t want to go back to the way it was,” she continued. “I want it to be  _ better  _ than it was. And why can’t it be?” she asked. “Why can’t we just sit around an’ listen to records and—oh, I don’t know— _ get t’ know one another again? _ ” She closed her eyes, swaying ever-so-slightly. “Maybe even become friends again.”

The idea, surprisingly, appealed immensely to Paul. But he shifted his weight to his other foot and crossed his arms, combative to the end and unwilling to give an inch. “Why  _ can’t _ we? More like why  _ should _ we? What’s in it fer us?”

If she was wounded by his words, she didn’t let on. “We have a history, whether you like it or not,” she reminded him. “And fate conspired to throw us together unbidden, again, right here and right now. So the way I see it we have a few options, one of which involves you chargin’ out that door, but if you do, that’ll be it. We’ll never see each other again.” 

“Is that a threat?” 

Julia shrugged. “It’s a fact.” 

Paul’s ears buzzed. “And the other options?”

She held his gaze, unwavering. “We can sit here and rehash the past, and  _ then  _ you can charge out the door, because—let’s be honest—that’s what’ll ‘appen,” she said, temporarily losing the London lilt on her tongue. “Or we can sit and listen to records and let this thing play out without forcing anything one way or the other. Just see what happens.”

John, still silent on the sofa, slapped his palms on his knees. “I hear music,” he stood up, grabbing the bottle of tequila in one hand. “Paul?”

Paul stopped fighting, his defenses weakened by the very real affection he felt for them both. He didn’t want to be insensitive; . “If nothing else, at least I won’t have lied to Jane after all…” he offered a droll chuckle. “I told ‘er we were going to listen to the new album.”

Julia squealed. “Right! Yer new album! I bought it today! Can we ‘ave a listen?”

In an instant, after hearing all posh traces of her accent erased from her lips—by her excitement or the alcohol, Paul had no idea—he found himself relaxing into the scenario. John groaned, not wanting to hear the thing, but Julia was already on it, charging down the corridor and to the stairs that led to the first floor, beckoning them to follow her.

Which they did.

“How did she have so many shots of this already?” John looked down at the brown bottle in his hand. “I can’t feel my chin and I only had one…”

“You’re okay with this?”

John took a moment to look at Paul, but when he did, the words came out as if they’d been sitting there against his teeth, awaiting release. “Sort yourself out, son,” John warned. 

“Why?”

Paul knew he was pushing his luck; he had no idea why he was being so confrontational. As the two men stopped halfway up the first set of stairs, John was having none of it.

“Look around you. Listen,” he said. “There are no screamin’ fans. No press. No photographers. No one knows we’re ‘ere. When was the last time that happened?”

Paul couldn’t answer right away. “It’s been a while.”

“Right,” John said. “So the way I see it you can either get over yourself and try to enjoy it or you can leave. I don’t care. I’m not going to let you ruin this.”

“Not going to  _ let _ me?”

John narrowed his eyes and continued on ahead of him, and Paul—thoroughly reprimanded and sulking on account—followed a few somber steps behind.

Julia had put on the record and the sound of their own voices, their own music, hit their ears as they gained the landing. There were two doors on the landing: one sat closed while another, open, led to a bedroom beyond, directly above the living room downstairs. Both he and John walked in, enveloped by the sound booming from the speakers of her record player, which were stacked on top of wooden crates that housed her record collection.

“Shouldn’t you turn that down?” John warned.

“Why?” she asked. “I don’t ‘ave neighbours. No one lives ‘ere, the whole length of the road. I mean, durin’ the day the doctors and dentists park their cars in their garages, but after office hours, Weymouth Mews is my playground…”

She sat on the floor opposite the record player. There was an ornate but faded Oriental rug on the wooden floor and a few large cushions spread about on it. The walls were painted a stark white, but with the warmth of the reddish-orange lamp in the corner spilling its colour all around, it wasn’t as cold as it might have otherwise been. 

“The bathroom is in there,” Julia pointed vaguely towards the closed door they’d left behind them on the landing. “You can go check it out if you want.”

John seemed intrigued. Paul just needed to take a leak.

“I’ve got a roof garden too,” she said. “Third floor is my bedroom. There’s a lovely wrought iron staircase that leads up to the roof, and—” 

“How do you afford this?” John asked.

She grinned. “Pretty spectacular, isn’t it?”

John took a long pull from the bottle of tequila and handed it to Paul, who did the same, without remembering what it was. He made a face, and Julia laughed, and Paul was a goner. He took another sip and sank to the floor onto a cushion, and let his own music wash over him.

Hours later, Julia was sprawled on the floor, one arm delicately raised above her head, one leg marking the off-beat of an imagined song with each tap of her toes on the edge of the carpet. John was on his back under the window, finishing off another joint, with the contents of Julia’s record collection splayed out around him—the sleeve for  _ Getz/Gilberto _ , the album they had put on once again after listening to  _ Beatles for Sale _ , lay in his lap. Paul leaned on his side, propped up by a few pillows, watching them both. They’d finished off the remnants of four bottles of various alcohol, mixing drinks with abandon; they were surrounded by empties. In the corner, the jazzy bossa nova record they’d played four times in a row was stuck in the lead-out groove. Paul closed his eyes and listened to the sound as it turned and turned and turned…

“I did wrong by both of you,” Julia said finally, drunkenly. “I wasn’t fair and I’m sorry for that. You deserved better.” She pushed herself up to sit cross-legged, teetering until she found equilibrium. “That’s what this is really about, why I asked you ‘round. I needed to clear the air.” She sat up as straight as she could. “I wanted to stay in Liverpool and figure things out properly, but there were things… things that I ‘ad no control over. I got scared and I ran, and I wished I hadn’t for two very long years. I wish  _ so badly  _ that I hadn’t—” she trailed off suddenly and turned her face to focus on the two of them, which was difficult as they were on opposite sides of the rug and she couldn’t keep them both in her field of vision at the same time. She sighed and gave up, downcasting her eyes to her hands in her lap. “Not t’ sound so full of meself, but if I would’ve stayed for another moment, I would’ve broken up The Beatles, and don’t you try ‘n tell me different,” she shook her head. “Or it could’ve been worse. You were getting too big. An’ I didn’t want to be seen, didn’t want to be found. Bein’ around you would’ve made that an absolute impossibility.”

“Why didn’t you want to be seen?” John asked, sitting up to look at her. “Was it because of the police?”  
“In a way…” she said, looking to Paul.

He remembered the fear in her eyes and her voice as she intimated the dark stories of her past, the snippets of her rambling remembrances. Not that he had forgotten about it, but the memories returned anew the moment her grey eyes locked on his. Paul wanted to remind her that they’d managed to keep John’s marriage a secret for a long time, that—no matter what she was afraid of—none of whatever she was running from would have made it past the police barricades that surrounded them almost everywhere they went, that being with them would have been the safest place in the world.  _ If only you’d stayed… we could have helped you… we could have protected you... _

“I want us t’ be friends,” she continued. “We started off as friends, and things got a ‘lil screwy. But I’m on the mend, an’ you’re both off the market, so there shouldn’t be any complications this time, yeah?”

“Yer off the market too, aren’t yeh?” Paul asked. 

John screwed up his face and scoffed.

“It’s not so bad, what I’ve got going,” she said, her voice suddenly changed. “And he’s just a fella. Someone who helps me to afford a place like this.” Julia then blinked her eyes a few times slowly and deliberately. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

John tapped out a rhythm against the hardwood floor. “What are you going to do now?”

She shrugged. “Who knows?”

“And us?” Paul asked.

“What  _ about _ you?”

He shook his head and felt his brain scramble and slosh around next to the tequila and the vodka and the rum. His face flushed, hot from his jaw to his temples. “Well, are we going to be a part of the fabulous new life of Julia Fitzpatrick?”

“I’d like that,” she said. “If you can find a place for me in yours.”

Paul glanced at John, wondering what was behind his heavy and half-lidded eyes. There was no easy fix to this; if he wanted Julia in his life—and who was he kidding? Of course he did—he would have to deal with it: with her creatively loose affinity with the truth, and the easy way with which she seemed to be able to fib her way forward, with their past and how they were going to navigate the future, all of that… with John.

Paul rocked himself up onto his knees, nearly pitching forward into the centre of the rug, then leaned back on his haunches and tried to stand up, feeling as though his legs were cemented together, that he was pushing up through mud to stand erect.

“Well I suppose we should get going,” he said, which was not in any way an answer to her question or to their situation. And he knew it.

Julia glanced at her wrist before realizing she wasn’t wearing a watch. “So early?”

Paul couldn’t have disagreed more; he felt like he’d been sitting there for days. What had started out as an opportunity to get answers had not unfolded the way he expected. Paul had far too many questions but no longer knew how to ask them. He was so unsatisfied: he wanted  _ details _ . He wanted to know more, about where she’d been, why she hadn’t tried to contact him, the names of all the boys she’d let lie between her legs from the moment she left his side that night and this moment, right then. He wanted to know why she couldn’t have made it with him, why she hadn’t trusted him earlier, why she’d trusted John instead. But he also wondered if there was enough alcohol in all bottles amassed around them to loosen any of them up to the point when those questions could be asked or answered.

“I think we’ve done enough talkin’ for the night,” Paul slurred. “I need to do some thinkin’… .”

He backed up a bit, unintentionally defensive. Julia stood up then, having some difficulty herself; only John seemed steady on his feet. 

“You’re angry.”

Paul started to nod but the movement of his head made him lose his balance. He stopped, opting instead for words, repeating what he’d just said. “I need to think…”

Julia looked a little crestfallen; her sad eyes shone in the ruddy light thrown from the corner lamp, and even though he was nearly legless, he could still make out the tears standing against her eyelashes. 

“You’re right,” she smiled, shaking her head. “This is all new, and I did poorly by you both. I deserve that.”

“I just need time...”

Julia nodded again. “Time, of course… of course,” she said, adding with a soft, small smile. “Just don’t wait too long.”

Paul wanted to ask why not. He wanted to know what would happen if he did wait too long. But he lost his nerve when he realised that John was at his side, his hand under his elbow, and that his bandmate was leading him out the door.

He was faintly aware of John saying goodnight, of being led to the door and of being helped into his jacket and shoes. When the brisk cold of the night air hit his face, he inhaled sharply, filling his lungs with the stuff; it seemed to freeze in his chest, filling his bronchioles with ice crystals. He shivered, crookedly tripping on the cobblestones beneath his feet.

“Come ‘ead, Paul,” John hauled him up under the arm. “I had no idea you were such a lightweight.”

Paul frowned. “We drank a lot, John…”

“She seems sorry,” John offered.

“I don’t care.”

“You do, you know.”

“I don’t,” Paul said. “And I really resent that you think you know me so well.”

“I know you loved ‘er,” John said. “Once upon a time, anyway.”

Paul sighed. “You did too, didn’t you?”

John was silent; it was a tacit agreement. Paul was satisfied, smug even; it didn’t bother him nearly as much as he thought it would. Rather, like a point of pride, he tried to fix the moment in his memory as the first time he’d guessed the mind of John Lennon and had been one hundred percent right. 

They’d fallen in love with the same woman; Paul could have done a lot worse for a romantic rival. 

They trudged along together, letting the sounds of the London night filter towards them instead of trying to compete with it for attention. When they reached the car, parked at the other end of the mews, John opened the door and poured Paul inside.

“We can be friends,” Paul said.

“‘Course we can.”

“Men and women can be friends without all that other nonsense gettin’ in the way.”

“‘S easy.”

Paul poked his elbow into John’s ribs. “But all that other nonsense is pretty nice, innit?” he drawled.

John nodded but said nothing. Paul shivered and hunkered down in his jacket. 

Their driver drove out of the mews and around the block, winding his way to Wimpole Street. When they finally stopped, they tumbled out, and John sent their driver home. It was assumed that John would follow Paul into the house and up the stairs to Paul’s room, just as they’d done a dozen times before when recording had run late or John had had a few too many and was unwilling to face his wife upon the return home. As they approached the door, Paul felt around in his pockets. Clumsily, he stuck cold, thick, drunken hands in each available space about his person, searching aimlessly for his keys and finding nothing.  
When he looked up at John, the older guitarist couldn’t help but laugh.

“You’re a fuckin’ bright one, aren’t yeh?” John teased.

“Shurrup,” Paul huffed. They began the trek around to the back, where they would use the system set up by Jane’s father to get Paul inside as covertly as possible when fans were clamouring at the front door: through the basement suite of the office next door, up to the top floor balcony, over the railing onto Paul’s balcony, and in through the bedroom window, left unlatched. There, without bothering to take off their jackets, they fell back on to the bed, side-by-side.

“You don’t want her?” Paul asked lazily.

John sighed and stared up and out the window; Paul waited, absently, for his friend’s response. 

Finally, he received it. “I gave up on that a long time ago, Paul.”

“You did?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Why?”

John huffed. “Because I don’t feel like goin’ twelve rounds with you over her again. We’re past that.”

Paul didn’t know how to feel about that. “I wonder if it’ll even be the same anymore…” he wondered aloud.

“What do you mean?”

Paul furrowed his brow.  _ What  _ _ do _ _ you mean? Without John to fight with? _

Beside him, John sighed. “Go to sleep Paul.”

“All right, John,” Paul murmured. “G’night.”

“Night.”

And so they slept.

 


	27. Lies, Damned Lies, and Romantics

Chapter Soundtrack: "[A Catalogue of Afternoons](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ubjylmxrj9o)"

* * *

JOHN: Our girls had all turned out to be Eppy’s dream. For us to settle down with respectable women, raise our families, all squeaky clean-like—could you imagine if any of us had spent the bulk of the nineteen-sixties in the public eye with an uncouth Liverpool runaway, a girl with a sordid past like hers? If I’d divorced my poor, long-suffering wife for her? If Paul had dumped his beautiful and posh and charming actress girlfriend for her? ( _Laughter_ ) Of course, I _wanted_ to be with Julia, but... I really tried to push her from my mind after that night, to be entirely honest with you. I really did. She and Paul still had their own things to work out, and I knew that’s what needed to happen if anything _was_ going to happen. I harboured no illusions. I’d conceded defeat a long time ago.

WILSON: But you were still in love with her, yes?

* * *

5 December 1964  
The next morning…

John had looked at Julia across the Oriental rug and seemed to see her for the first time. He wanted to be a part of her story, now more than ever; but something within—the same something that told him he’d never amount to anything, that he’d never be good enough, that he’d always be a disappointment—told him he never would be.

Of course she and Paul would patch things up; he knew they would. It was just a matter of time. _“Let this thing play out without forcing anything one way or another.”_ That’s what she’d said. And John knew as well as anyone what that was going to mean…

He just never thought it would happen so swiftly.

The morning after the impromptu drinking game at Julia’s new home, Paul had awoken, hungover, but with a strange sense of purpose. He’d leaned up on one elbow, hair mussed and sleep-scented, and had looked at John across the bed from him.

“What you said last night,” Paul started. “About us being past all that… did you mean it?”

John shrugged, only half-hearing the question. “Sure.”

Paul lapsed into silence, but John could sense that more was coming.

“What is it Paul?”

The bassist took a breath. “Well, I’m just thinking… what would people think if I chucked Jane and went with Jules?”

John groaned and rolled over, away from Paul, and pretended he’d still been sleeping. “Eah, Paul… knock it off, will yeh?”

“‘S only a question.” Paul collapsed heavily on his side of the bed, knocking John between the shoulder blades with his elbow.

John arched his back and inadvertently jabbed Paul in the ribs. “Fuckin’ ‘ell.”

“Sorry.”

He rolled over with a sigh and folded his arms under his head. “Is that what you wanna do?”

“Dunno.”

John suddenly wished he had his cigarettes with him. He needed a smoke. His eyes hurt. “Well.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to be with Jane. Y’know… she’s all right. She’s just… .”

 _Not Julia_. John knew how that felt. He exhaled loudly through his nose and wondered if Paul felt at all guilty for talking about ditching Jane while sleeping in a bed in her parents’ house.

“What do _you_ think?” Paul asked suddenly.

John shot back. “If yer tossin’ Jane, mind if I ‘ave a go?”

Paul sighed. “That’s not what I meant.”

John laughed. “‘Course it’s not,” he said.

Paul propped himself up again on his elbow and stared at John.

“Yer not gonna kiss me, are yeh?” John squinted up at him.

Paul was lost in thought. “I don’t know what to do.”

“There’s nothing _to do._ Nothin’ yer gonna do right now, anyway,” John said. “So drive me home.”

So that’s what they did, driving back up to Weybridge to spend a lazy Saturday afternoon together. They sat in front of the television in the sunroom, the only room in the house aside from the attic where the chaos of renovation had ceased. The whole scene made John acutely and painfully aware of how little fatherhood suited him; watching Paul play with Julian on the floor in front of the television while Cyn lounged on the sofa, it almost seemed, to John, that he was watching someone else’s family through a one-way mirror. He rationalized it by telling himself if Julian had come along a bit later, maybe when he had a bit more time and wasn’t so estranged from his family by his job, he would have been better at it. But seeing the way Paul interacted with the boy made him question even that. Paul saw Julian less often than John did; he was twenty two, the same age John had been when Julian was born. Yet there was no alienation, no awkwardness in the way _he_ played; when he held Julian in his arms, Paul didn’t look like _he_ was nervous about dropping him.

But even now, that’s exactly how John felt.

Even worse, for John, was the easy way Paul and Cynthia got on. He would walk into their home and Cynthia would brighten, ask him if he wanted a cup of tea. They’d chat amiably, like old friends— _Like old lovers_ , John would think sometimes, though he never seriously suspected that anything untoward was going on—for hour upon hour, without a break for breathing. It made John incredibly jealous; more than once, long after Paul had gone home after one of his marathon visits and Julian had been put to bed, John would feel the desperate need to lay claim to his wife, and out of anger or spite or jealousy or fear, he would take her. It filled him with shame at times to think that he was so deeply affected by it, but it was a fact of his life, nonetheless.

It was no secret that Paul wanted what John had: a wife, a family, a home. And John wanted what Paul had: freedom, bachelorhood, London on his doorstep. But John knew it would happen for Paul, that he would take the things John struggled with and spin them into something positive for himself, something worth wanting, Rumplestiltskin-like. Propelling himself ten or twenty years in the future, more than once John had foreseen visits to the McCartney home, a beautiful wife baking in the kitchen, five children crowded around the piano in the family room for sing-a-longs. And John would think: _‘Typical Paul’_.

But then he’d look at the life around him, at the cruel satire of Paul’s happiness in which he actually existed, and he’d curse his terrible luck. He hadn’t gotten into rock and roll to become domesticated, and yet that’s exactly what had happened.

Everything seemed to come so easily to the bassist: melodies, lyrics, women. Apparently fatherhood would follow suit, if his interactions with Julian were any indication. And now, on top of everything else, John somehow seemed to know that Paul would end up with Julia. He steeled himself against the inevitability, but he knew that if he ever lived to see the day when she became Mrs. Paul McCartney, it would have to be the end of his partnership with Paul. It was that simple.

These were the thoughts that occupied the fertile but depressed mind of John Lennon on that dreary Saturday afternoon. He didn’t even realise the day had passed them by until Paul finally stood up from out of his corner of the sofa and stretched himself limber. It was dusky outside; a light frost dusted the sidewalk and the lawn beyond it.

“It’s been lovely visitin’,” Paul said, cheerily. “But I should get back before the Ashers think I’ve gone and run myself off the road.”

Cynthia swatted Paul’s arm and admonished him. “Don’t talk like that, Paul.”

John felt his cheeks colouring at the tender gesture of concern his wife showed for Paul. He clenched a fist and let it go as they walked together to the front door.

“I think I might pop ‘round and see Ringo in the next few days,” Paul wrapped his scarf around his neck. “Do either of yeh want to come along?”

John cleared his throat. “I dunno,” he said. “Can you imagine if we both went up there? The hospital wouldn’t be able to handle it.”

Paul nodded. “True,” he sighed. “Well, I suppose I could just go up myself.” He paused. “Maybe Julia will want to come along.”

At the mention of Julia’s name, Cynthia turned her head to look at John. He coloured a bit. “Yeh, well, let me know how it goes,” he replied.

“Sure thing,” Paul said. He shoved his hands into his pockets, grabbed his keys and dangled them knowingly in front of John with a smirk. “No repeat of last night, eh?”

John managed a smile and opened the door for his friend. “See you, Paul.”

“Yeah, see you. Bye Cyn,” he leaned over and kissed her cheek and laughed, “Tell Julian ‘toodle-oo’ fer me.” As he said it, he made his voice go funny, ‘toodle-oo’, like a cartoon character; in his mind, he could see Julian giggling, and John wondered why he couldn’t inspire such joy in his own son the way Paul could do so easily.

“I will,” she smiled. He waved and marched off toward his car; John closed the door after him.

Cynthia made her way back into the family room ahead of John. A long silence stretched between them; John knew why it was there. He watched her back as she got farther away from him, receded into the cavern of his home.

“So,” she said finally, faraway. “What’s this about Julia?”

John trod carefully. “Yeah,” he cleared his throat. “I took Paul over to see ‘er the other day.” He stood at the window and watched as Paul drove off down the driveway. “She’s deeply immersed in the London dating world. Did you know that?” He hoped it would mollify her:  _She's dating! She has a boyfriend! She's not a threat!_

Of course that subtext was a bald-faced lie.

“No John,” Cynthia stepped around the corner and took away a few of the dishes on the table. “How could I know that?”

John pretended to ignore her.

“Were you going to tell me?” she asked.

“Tell you what?”

“That you met up with ‘er.”

He shrugged. “Dunno.”

Her silence spoke volumes. He hadn’t the faintest clue she would become this jealous. But he knew he was hurting her; she had long suspected him of being unfaithful to her with Julia, and even though nothing other than that one kiss between the two of them had transpired, he felt the twinge of guilt on his conscience as he watched the beautiful woman he’d married turn on her heel and walk out of the room to wash their dishes. He knew what she was thinking and he could say nothing to dissuade her. There wasn’t anything _to_ say.

John heard Julian waking up from his nap, crying out for someone. “Cyn, the baby,” he said to her; it came out meaner than he’d intended. She shut off the water in the kitchen and asked him to repeat what he’d said, but by then she’d heard Julian too, and was shortly on her way to the nursery.

John was already back in the sunroom, door shut, where he would sit in front of the television until the sky darkened completely beyond the window panes.

* * *

JOHN: Of course I loved her. But I meant what I said to Paul—this was his fight now. And I knew he was going to have a harder time of it than the first go-around, so I was fully prepared to let him do it. I wasn’t interested in that. Not at first, anyway…


	28. A Night on the Town

Chapter soundtrack: "[Pipeline](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6zR7qJ9frA)" / "[How Insensitive](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWiL5XuJLQo)" / "[Telstar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMOmm6AlM1s)" / "[Slow 30s Room](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TufzRV5P630)"

PAUL: Looking back on it, there were a lot of issues in my relationship with Jane, long before Julia came back into my life. We were young and living in a fish bowl—it wasn’t going to be easy, even if everything else was perfect, and it wasn’t. There were political things. She was high class. People like her didn’t settle down into life as a Scouser’s wife, not for nothing anyway. She had a career in front of her that meant more to her than I did and she had the means to be able to pursue it, at a time in history when that kind of thing was becoming acceptable for a young woman to do. I get it; I never blamed her. But I’d always wanted the stability that came with a house and a family, and she was looking out for her career. ( _Pause_ ) I was very aware that here was a girl I’d never have had a chance with if I hadn’t been a Beatle. Girls I’d taken out before, from Liverpool and Hamburg, were… rougher, Northern. Jane was…

MURPHY: The opposite of Julia.

PAUL: In a lot of ways, yes. Everyone knew about Jane, but nobody knew about Julia. I saw the appeal of that right away. They were two very different people and they spoke to different parts of me—Jane to the part of me that wanted that high life, Julia to the part of me that was rooted in Liverpool. Neither of them were better or worse than the other. They were just… _different_.

* * *

11 December 1964

Kingly Street

Paul was less-than-impressed with the poor excuse for a fancy dress party that Jane had dragged him to. Of all the places in the world he wanted to be, the grand opening of yet another cookie cutter London nightclub was the last one on the list. But he’d gone because it meant so much to Jane, because the man who’d poured too much of his trust fund into a bland and artless quasi-mod hangout just off Carnaby Street had been a childhood friend and Jane’s mother had taught him the piano, and she had attended so many gallery openings and film openings and world premieres of one sort or another as a Beatle girlfriend that the _least_ he could do was return the favour.

He feigned interest for her sake and made a go of it.

The room was bedecked in pop art knock offs. Booths lined the walls and a few high tables crowded beside a low stage in one corner where the house band performing a rather artless imitation-Beach Boys routine. A few strategically placed black lights and a film projector displaying silent black and white film footage onto a white wall beside the dance floor seemed to be about the only interesting things in the place.

Of course the regular denizens of London’s nightlife—lesser members of the Royal Family, peers and politicians, a few models and TV personalities and a smattering of musicians—made their appearances, while a few other cringeworthy hangers-on were clearly only there because of the personalities rumoured to be in attendance. There were the requisite photographers and journalists, from the society pages and the entertainment magazines, reporting back on what the Beautiful People were doing this week. Jane clung to his side for most of the night, playing the part while rubbing elbows with the people she knew when she and Paul happened to drift into their several spheres.

Paul was nearing the end of his tether—tired and ready to go home—when they finally ran into Jane’s friend, the one whose misguided venture the whole evening was designed to disguise.

“Paul, you remember Philip?” Jane said over the raucous noise proffered from the stage.

Paul watched as Philip materialized in front of him; he didn’t know him from Adam, and nothing about the kid seemed familiar in the slightest. The way his wavy hair was styled—a kind of crude facsimile of the now-ubiquitous moptop, made up as much as the man’s coarse hair would allow—and his thick black glasses reminded Paul of Jane’s brother, Peter; apart from that, the well-heeled gentleman rang no bells. Paul switched his drink glass from one hand to the other in order to offer a handshake to Jane’s friend. “Gear party.”

Philip grinned. “I’m glad you like it!”

 _Too bad it’ll close within a month,_ Paul thought. He smiled anyway and nodded.

Philip scanned the crowd around him before reaching out and guiding someone to them. “I’d like you to meet someone,” he said.

Paul’s whole body stiffened and his heart dropped into his shoes, and as Julia’s eyes met his, he felt his stomach cave.

“Julia,” Paul breathed.

Philip seemed both shocked and dismayed that his surprise guest was not much of a surprise at all. “You know each other?” he asked.

Jane cast shocked eyes at Paul but said nothing. Something about Julia’s expression let him know he might have let a cat out of a bag, though which cat and which bag he couldn’t say; all he knew was that, as Julia nodded and smiled and took control of the conversation, he needed to button up.

“Paul and I knew each other  _when we was young up in the ‘Pool,_ ” she said, exaggerating her accent for the benefit of her listeners, but holding Philip’s arm tightly as she said it.

“Really?” Jane asked. “Paul, you never mentioned—”

“Yeah, Julia an’ I go way back,” he said.

“How are you?” Julia asked Paul, pretending as though it was the first time they’d seen each other in years, rather than the second time in a week.

He cleared his throat and played along. “Fine, you?”

She smiled. “Enjoying the night,” she said, sticking her hand out to Jane. “We’ve never met. Julia Fitzpatrick.”

“Jane Asher.”

“I’ve seen you perform,” Julia admitted. “You’re a marvellous actress.”

“Thank you,” Jane said, and Paul was relieved to see a genuine smile on her face as she engaged Julia in casual banter he had no trouble drowning out with the noise in the club. He watched as the two of them chatted, animatedly; Jane with her expressive face, eyes wide and smiling, Julia with the broad sweeps of Liverpool in her hands. He didn’t need to know what they were saying; he didn’t care. It filled him with affection—romantic, brotherly, paternalistic—and little else mattered besides that.

Within a few minutes, however, it was old friends Philip and Jane who were deeply engrossed in their own conversation, reminiscing about past friends and asking the old familiar “How are your folks?” questions of one another. Paul and Julia were left to stand, awkwardly, side-by-side, watching their dates flirt openly with each other.

Paul took a sip from his glass.

“Hi!” Julia finally shouted over the din.

“Hm?”

“I said hello.”

“Oh,” he said, reading her lips. “Hello.”

“I didn’t think in a million years I’d see you here.”

“That makes two of us.”

“Hm?”

“Never mind.”

Julia laughed and turned away, catching Jane’s eye, and the room spun back into focus as his current girlfriend honed in on his former lover.

“Paul,” Jane said, sidling up to him, circling her arm through his. “Philip said he could take us on a tour. See how the place runs. Doesn’t that sound fun?”

Paul had no desire to see the back room workings of a second rate night club. The face he’d made seemed to answer her question—she visibly deflated in the nanoseconds before her expert façade rebuilt itself—and she was about to turn down her friend’s offer when Paul piped up.

“Why don’t you go. I’ll get us a drink,” he said.

She didn’t really smile. “Is that alright with you?”

He shrugged and lobbed a desperate, hospital pass her way. “Let old friends get reacquainted,” he said, eyeing Philip. “That’s what you came here for, right?”

His deflection, in any other situation, might have earned him a rebuke, but he knew he’d avoided the tackle when she nodded and smiled, not defeated but resigned. She lifted herself up on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek before spiriting away through the crowd with Philip at her side.

As Philip and Jane walked off, the band on stage mercifully wound down their set, and someone began playing records from a turntable located beside the stage. Paul relaxed as the volume of the noise around him decreased.

“Where are they going?” Julia asked, genuinely concerned, and the back half of his hastily-thought-out plan began to unfold of its own accord. He had no idea what he expected would happen once Jane was off with Philip; winging it, he smiled.

“Wanna dance?”

Julia was still looking off after the disappearing duo. “That’s _my_ date absconding with _your_ girlfriend.”

The worry in her voice was disconcerting, and Paul found it odd—so much concern, it seemed, for a man that was definitely not the man John had seen her with only days before. How serious could they be? “They’ll come back, I promise.”

She wasn’t convinced. Distracted, she turned back to him. “You wanted to dance?”  
Paul shrugged. “If you do.”

Julia narrowed her eyes at him. “Just dancing?”

Paul finished his drink and left it on a nearby table before holding out his hand to her. She accepted, and he led her onto the small dance floor, hemmed in on all sides by solid walls of people.

Julia closed her eyes and swayed to the beat, and with an undulating crowd pulsing beside him and fresh alcohol in his veins, Paul felt braver than he’d felt in a long time. He moved closer and took her hand in his, letting his other hand intimately skim the fabric of her dress where it curved over her hip.

“I haven’t danced in a long time,” she said.

“Me neither.”

“You don’t dance when you go out?”  
He shook his head. “We usually find a corner to sit in away from the crowds…”

“But tonight?”

“Tonight was Jane’s decision,” he said.

Julia smirked. “You didn’t want to come at all?”

Paul shook his head. “Not exactly. I just—there are other things I’d rather do than attend a club opening.”

She nodded knowingly and then went silent, continuing to twist her way closer to Paul in the throbbing crowd.

“What about you?” he asked. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m with Philip.”

“Yeah, but—”

The song had ended and Paul lowered his voice to avoid being overheard, but it wasn’t long before a new song—a slower song, the same sashaying beat as he remembered hearing in Julia's flat before—picked up and the couples around them paired off again, pelvically-joined and swaying in time with the music. Julia seemed to blush as she realised they were hemmed in on all sides.

Paul flicked his eyebrow and shrugged at Julia. "Well?"

She averted her gaze, but something in the way she did it told Paul he wasn't out of line just yet. The gap between them narrowed by virtue of the people around them; Paul barely had to move his arm before finding the curve of Julia's hip, the warmth in the small of her back, the softness of her body against his. They were lost in a sea of navel gazers, islands unto themselves. There was a kind of privacy to it. Paul felt a surge in his chest, emboldened by the relative invisibility.

Julia looked up at him, a coy smile on her lips. "Hi," she said, and this time, he heard her crystal clearly.

They were the only two people in the entire room. For what felt like an eternity, that's how it stayed; swaying hip to hip, Julia's small hand clasped covertly in his, his thumb pressed against her palm where her heartbeats danced. Bliss, to a bossa nova beat.

Suddenly, he felt her stiffen; the spell was broken. Brought back to the room they were in, Paul wondered how long they'd been holding each other. But the old muscle memory reactivated, synapses firing faster than they had since all those nights ago, on dark Liverpool streets or in dank Liverpool basements, when the slightest change in the status quo would have set Julia off. The hard familiarity of it made Paul ache. He searched her face for clues.

Her eyes darted left and right, landing anywhere but on his face. “On second thought, I-I don’t think a slow dance—”

“Right,” Paul said. He knew what it would look like, how it would be portrayed if a photograph was taken of the two of them nestled together. He furrowed his brow. "Right..."

Julia turned around and began to needle her way through the crowd toward a less-crowded space, near the film still playing against the opposite wall, with Paul following a short distance behind. They were nearly at the edge of the throng when Julia was jostled by a drifting drunkard, excited by the wild beat of the next song to come on over the club's sound system. She was thrown off balance just enough for her to fall from her towering heels. As she went down, Paul was the one who caught her, his arm sliding under hers and across her back moments before she would have hit the floor.

“Are you okay?” Paul asked as he hauled her to her feet.

Embarrassed, she brushed off her dress, which was now torn; she scanned the crowd, hoping no one had noticed, but of course they had, and her cheeks flushed. She forced a smile. “I’m fine.”

She bent down and retrieved her shoe, the heel nearly completely detached from the sole.

“Jesus,” she said.

Paul glanced at the shoe in her hand, the other one still on her foot. “What’re you gonna do?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, looking around for her date. “I think I should go home.”

Paul helped her over to a vacant stool near the long bar that spanned one length of the room. A few curious passersby asked if she was okay and she smiled as brightly as she could, answering in the affirmative every time. “I fell and was caught by a Beatle,” she grinned. “It’s every girl’s dream!”

Paul felt acutely uncomfortable, without being able to put a name to the reason why. When he spotted Jane coming back through the crowd, he waved her over.

“What happened?” she asked.

“I was knocked over,” Julia blushed. “I’m fine.”

Jane’s eyes studied Julia, head to toe, before honing in on the tear along the side of her dress. “Oh dear,” she said, lightly touching the frayed edge, the loose threads. “At least it’s the seam. It should be an easy fix.”

She turned to Paul. “Why don’t we bring her back ‘round to ours?” she suggested, thinking she was being helpful. “I’m sure I can scare up a sewing kit. Have you mended in no time.”

But Julia shook her head. “No, that’s awfully kind of you, but my shoe is broken and—”

Philip rejoined them, concern evident on his face as well. “Are you okay?” he asked her, and Julia’s broad smile made Paul’s insides twist in around themselves; the open affection she showed this second-rate playboy enflamed his jealousy.

As he watched the two converse—Philip offering to pay for her broken shoe and any repairs to the dress, Julia blushing ferociously as she told him it wasn’t worth it—he became dimly aware of the fact that someone was beelining toward the four of them at the bar, there in his peripheral vision. Before Paul had the chance to register what was happening, or to clock the very real threat posed to them, Julia’s handsome date was laid out cold by a sucker-punch delivered by the intruder.

Everything happened so fast and none of it was clear to Paul in the moment. The crowd reacted predictably. The women nearby shrieked and jumped back as Philip fell to the floor; a few men tried valiantly to hold the attacker back as he spewed a hateful rant at the man on the floor, who sported a bloody nose and the beginnings of a black eye; the music playing over it all stopped and the only sounds were those of voices raised in anger and alarm. Paul had instinctively pushed Jane behind him, but she knelt at Philip’s side, calling his name and trying to rouse him, with Julia, shocked, standing right beside them. It was then that the irate man still looming over them all swung his arm, his hand connecting with Julia’s face with a sickening half-slap/half-crack that sent her reeling.

As he was finally dragged away by the men holding his arms, Paul heard the man call Julia a whore, and he saw her flinch at the awful designation.

She didn’t make eye contact with anyone but clutched her face in her trembling hands. Paul stepped forward. “Julia are you—?”

“You need to leave,” Julia said, tears in her voice. “Now.”

In the excitement of that moment, Paul had forgotten where he was, who he was with, and what could have happened next. But Julia was right; it seemed a good idea, before the newspapermen began vulturing, before he was caught on camera, before his name became linked with a bar fight. “Right,” he said. He touched Jane’s elbow, which was all the impetus she needed to get a move on.

“There’s a back entrance,” Julia said, her voice trembling as she pointed towards the back of the room. Paul saw the mark on her face where she’d been struck; careful to hide it, Julia lifted a shaking hand to her cheek again. His stomach bottomed out.

“Go,” she urged.

Jane tugged at the sleeve of Paul’s jacket and with one last apologetic look in Julia’s direction, the two of them slipped away through the crowds toward the back of the bar, where they made their way down the steps and into a deserted alley, half a block up from where their chauffeured car was parked.

Alone, cold, shaken, the two of them found little refuge in the sudden quiet of the alleyway.

“Are you okay?” Jane asked him.

Paul nodded, his stomach tight and quivering. “Let’s go,” he said, leading the way to the side street.

* * *

At home, Paul found his way to the Asher family piano while Jane telephoned Philip’s parents to explain what had happened. “It’s the least I can do for a family friend,” Jane had told him by way of explanation as she dialled their number against his protestations; the less said about it, to anyone, the better, he thought. But Paul was powerless to really stop her, and so he occupied his mind at the piano instead of fretting over the floorboards at her side.  

He’d never before had an issue finding homes for his long slender fingers amongst the keys, but tonight nothing came, not as long as Julia was occupying the other half of his brain. His hands shook, and with every tremor his heart thudded hard in his chest. As the world outside the window inked itself out, he sat in measured silence, watching a light snow begin to fall, as he tried to forget about the look on Julia’s face as she was attacked by the angry bar patron.

When Jane finally hung up the phone, twenty minutes had elapsed. She sidled next to him on the piano bench and wrapped an arm around his back.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

She sat up against him, resting her own hands on the upper keys, their shoulders touching. “What a terrible thing…”

"The attack?" he asked. "Or the fact that it'll be in the papers?"

Jane scowled. “You must think I’m a monster,” she said. “Thinking about publicity…”

“No, I don’t,” Paul sighed. “It’s just…”

“Of course I’m worried about your friend, too.” She tutted. "But really, she should know better than to go with such a cad in the first place,” she clucked her tongue, dropping her voice. “Philip and I are old friends but... well, he wasn’t too far off from being implicated in The Scandal, you know.”

Paul nodded, understanding completely what she was talking about, even though she spoke in sweet half-euphemisms; the Asher way, he knew, a tried-and-true method for whitewashing the unsavoury. In this instance, it was John Profumo and his bedsit trysts in Wimpole Mews, just around the corner, which had made such huge headlines the year before. Of course he had no idea that Jane's childhood chum had narrowly avoided being caught up. Another closely guarded upper echelon secret, no doubt.  _Privileged upbringing has its... well, privileges_ , he thought.

Jane sighed. “For Doctor Carter to show up, well—”

Paul’s ears perked up. “Doctor _Henry_ Carter?”

Jane was removing an earring from her earlobe. “Yes,” she said. “You know him?”

Paul recalled that John had met Julia’s date the other night. _That was his name, wasn’t it?_ “Julia had a date with a bloke named Henry Carter a couple of weeks ago, is all.”

Jane slowed her movements and turned to look at Paul. “How do you know that?” she asked. “You said you hadn’t seen Julia in a few years.”

Paul shut his eyes and willed himself to turn back the clock thirty seconds to keep from sticking his foot in it. He sighed. “John ’n me, we met up with Julia a few weeks back. Ran into her, caught up a bit, that was that,” he swallowed. “She mentioned Carter, that’s all. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

Jane’s back straightened, her impossibly perfect posture now painfully erect. “I see,” she said, taking a deep breath and shutting her eyes for a long moment before exhaling around a sigh. “She has lots of boyfriends then?”

He shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. We… we haven’t seen her since before we moved to London,” he told her.

Another sigh. This time, Jane’s hands busied themselves with the earrings she’d placed on top of the piano. “She must be something special,” Jane said. “I’ve no idea what could possibly inspire such heated feelings between two grown men…”

Paul did. It wasn’t all that long ago that he’d sat bloodied and broken in a library stairwell staring at the mess he’d made of his friend’s body. They were no gentlemen, no holders of advanced degrees from fancy universities or landed gentry, members of the peerage, seated in the House of Lords or anything like men of stature in any measurable regard. But they’d been lovers of Julia, and they’d fought— _hard_ —over her. He suddenly sympathized with the two men he’d seen that night, fighting over the same woman…

“I wish I knew,” he lied.

Jane sighed again. “You should go over and see if she’s okay.”

He chuckled. “You can't be—?”

“I  _am_ serious, Paul,” she said, a singsong whine in her voice. “You’re friends, aren’t you? And after what happened, you’d think she would need a friend more than anything.”

He shook his head. “No, I think that’s overkill,” he said. “Besides, she’s probably not even home. I’d imagine she’s probably with Philip—”

“Philip will be recovering at the family home, I should think,” Jane let out a short laugh, and Paul bristled. He could never be sure, but moments like this—when he thought he heard her thinly-veiled disdain for what she assumed had to be Julia’s lowly stature and the incredulity that someone like _her_ could possibly be counted on to take care of someone like _him—_ made Paul’s skin crawl, simultaneously forcing him to hate her snootiness as much as his own Northern roots. He hoped he was imagining the subtext.

Jane clucked her tongue. “Well,” she said, planting a kiss on his cheek. “I think, if I were her, a visit from an old friend would be nice,” she said. “It can’t hurt to try, can it?”

Her naïveté was unnerving, and he seriously believed that she had no idea what she was suggesting. But she was firm, and he was both thrilled and nervous at the same time. As she left him to go up to bed, he wondered if he could really do it; two hours had passed until he was sure she’d fallen asleep and he let himself be convinced that Jane was right. He threw on his coat and shoes and slunk out of the house, down the back way to avoid the girls out front, and with his coat pulled up to hide his face he hurried towards the mews behind Harley Street, to Julia’s blue door.


	29. The Length of Shadows

* * *

Chapter soundtrack: "[The Length of Shadows](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JLYJluqliI&list=PLS_DIf4UmkU2LIMzmjnyFBta1MI1VvrnP&index=4&t=0s)"

* * *

 Paul didn't know which reality he preferred: the one where she answered her door or the one where she didn't. The three gentle raps he laid against the blue-painted wood were scarcely finished when he realized he wasn't prepared for either eventuality. Panic like bile rose in his throat. He shuffled from one foot to the other, counting seconds.  _One piccadilly, two piccadilly..._

But the door opened on the fifth piccadilly, and Paul found himself standing face to face with the answer he didn't know he wanted all along.

Gone was the shimmering black dress and the piled-high bouffant; instead, she wore her damp, freshly washed hair pulled back in a pony tail, a pair of white cotton shorts hitting her high on her thigh. Paul could see more than just the shape and outline of her breasts through the thin knit sweater that hung loose from her shoulders. White paint streaked her forehead and she had splatters of it on her legs and arms. Her eyes were red-rimmed; it was obvious she’d been crying, and the mottled pink and purple of the bruise on her cheekbone stood as a stark reminder of the events of the evening.

“Oh!” she said. She was still holding a brush in her hand; she used the back of her wrist to brush a damp strand of loose hair out of her face, smearing another streak of paint across her cheek in the process. “I wasn’t expectin’… .”

Paul raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Did you miss the canvas?”

She looked down at herself and laughed. “No canvas. I’m paintin’ the front room.”

“At this hour?” Paul asked. “After everything that's happened?”

She shrugged. “Good a time as any, I figure. After all, the night ended early.” She reached over to a small table by the door, dropping paint on it in the process, and picked up the glass she had probably just put down before answering. It was marked with fingerprints in paint; lipstick marks along the rim attested to this not being the first drink she'd poured into that glass. “So you’re here to see how I’m doing?” she asked.

He shivered from the cold and said nothing. She studied him over the rim of her glass before cocking her head to the side, indicating that he should come in with a slow blink of her eyes. He nodded his thanks and ducked through the doorframe. The cold lingered around his kneecaps for a while after she shushed the door closed behind him.

“Jane was worried,” Paul said. “I mean, so was I, but Jane convinced me to come by, to check in. After what happened at the club—”

She shook her head and turned her back on him, downing her glass in one long swig. Her unsteady walk confirmed his suspicion; she was far from alright.

She dropped her paintbrush into the metal painting tray just beyond the small entry hall and wiped her hand on her leg. “Drink?”

Paul nodded. “Whatever you’re having.”

Julia winked. “Scotch and… well, just scotch,” she grinned. “Sure you can handle it?”

“Ta,” Paul nodded.

“Ta,” she repeated, holding his gaze for a moment before breaking away and laughing to herself.

“You’ve been crying, haven’t yeh?” Paul asked.

She sniffled and forced another laugh as devoid of charm or mirth as the first one. “Look, let’s not pretend this is anythin’ other than what it is.” She looked like a child about to be reprimanded; Paul felt his heart cleave in two.

“Is that why you’re here,” he asked. “And not putting frozen peas on the black eye of your date? Or on your own eye, even?”

Paul watched as a distant cousin of the look he’d seen earlier that night—after a bitter man spewed hate at her feet—shadowed her face. He didn’t like it, and mentally kicked himself for opening his mouth.

“Jane’s a nice girl,” Julia said, her voice turning molten. “Too nice, you know, maybe.”

“I don’t understand.”

Julia flashed daring eyes at him. “Well she’s awfully trusting, isn’t she?”

Paul dared her right back. “Are you suggesting—?”

She shrugged, but her voice dropped as she cooed words dripping with sultry innuendo. “I’m doing whatever you want me to be doing, Paul…”

They stood there, considering each other for a moment in silence. Her words were shockingly brazen, and while he could blame drink for most of it, there was something else there beneath the surface that told him it was more than alcohol fuelling her words.

Before he could pick her apart any further, Paul saw her thinking better of whatever-it-was she was implying as she shook her head and tried to smile. Her eyes glistened again and Paul realised her tears were something he didn’t have the capacity to deal with; he was worried, of course, but he wanted her to laugh, to be warm and cheerful and embrace him the way she did once upon a time. He didn’t want her to cry and make thinly-veiled disparagements about his girlfriend, or drunken come-ons directed at him.

But he couldn’t think of anything else to say. “You were going to get me a drink,” he said finally, and Julia appeared relieved that the conversation seemed at an end. She turned on her heel and made her way back into the kitchen, leaving Paul alone in the living room.

Paul turned his attention to the room around him. It was a disaster. Large white tarpaulins and drop cloths lined the floor in the living room, and thin strips of tape masked off the window frames. The same stark white colour from the upstairs—from the room where their Society meeting had blown up spectacularly the other night—that colour had bled down into the front room, and the lights reflecting off the walls made everything seem so bright that Paul once again almost had to shield his eyes. But she’d added a few personal touches here and there; framed photos on the walls that had already been painted and dried, a poster from the Bond film _Dr. No_ sitting in a place of prominence above an old secretary’s desk beside the small fireplace, knicknacks of all sorts of colours and stripes lining the mantle next to a few choice books. It was starting to feel more like home.

“What exactly do you _do_ that you can afford a place a like this?” he asked.

That she didn’t immediately respond made his stomach clench; he wondered if he’d stepped over a line with his inquiry. But she chuckled.

“I _do_ work, Paul,” came her cryptic reply, followed by a pause. “Rent is just fifty quid a month, to the dentist who owns the practice out front. He doesn't need it. There’s some work that needs doing on the second floor. He said I can do whatever I want so long as I don’t cave the place in,” she sniffled. “This whole area, it’s filled with bedsits and cheap rentals, same as this. And he never bothers me. He’s only here when his practice is open, and I hear him park his car every once in a while, but that’s about it,” she laughed. “As long as I don’t mind the occasional screaming, anxious dental patient, the flat’s mine, he says.”

The clink of ice against glass filled the space in their conversation, and before he’d had a chance to say anything back to her, Julia came into the front room from the kitchen carrying two tumblers. She handed one to him and lifted her own. “To tonight.”

“To tonight,” he said, trying to smile back and finding the task nearly impossible.

“S’okay,” she said, lifting her own glass and its fresh ice cubes to her orbital bone and wincing where the glass made contact with her tender skin. “I should have known better than to accept a date with a man in such a public position, where there was such a high probability that I’d run into someone like Henry. I honestly thought we’d squared it all away, but I guess not.”

Paul lifted his glass, drinking down a hefty gulp of his double scotch. “I wish I’d have done more back there.”

She shrugged, seeing through him and knowing there was absolutely nothing he could have done, and knowing him well enough to understand that he wouldn’t have done anything even if he _could_ have.

“S’okay,” she said again. “You’re not exactly in the position to—I mean, the headlines! ‘ _Beatle To The Rescue!’_ And of course, with Jane…”

“I’m sorry about that,” he blurted.

“About what?”

“Jane.”

“Why?” she shrugged. “She’s lovely. I’m really very happy for you.” She said it like she meant it, and Paul couldn’t be sure if she did or not, but he almost believed it. “I mean, I couldn’t exactly expect that you’d wait fer me.”

“I didn’t know what I’d be waiting for,” he took a long pull from the glass. “Or how long I’d be waitin’.”

She nodded. “And you’re about as good at being alone as I am.”

The comment was a little too on-the-nose. He downed the rest of the glass.

“I’m really sorry,” she added.

Paul shook his head. “The past.”

She nodded thoughtfully before taking a gulp of her own drink, shrugging her shoulders, and smiling. “Well, good then.”

“Right.”

Julia glanced at his glass and cocked her eyebrow. “Another?”

He debated only a second before handing the glass back with a nod.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” she smiled again, as she busied herself once more at the liquor cabinet.

There was nowhere to sit; all of her furniture had been covered in order to accommodate the painting she was doing. So they leaned against unpainted sections of wall and paced the length of the floorboards getting properly reacquainted. Conversations about the weather and road work creating congestion on certain busy London thoroughfares gradually warmed up, and they chatted amiably about Paul’s brother and the band, or Julia’s plans to turn the second floor bedroom into an office or a studio—“ _Maybe even a dark room,_ ” she wondered aloud, “ _Once I can afford to take photos again…_ ”—to knock out the walls and make the third and uppermost floor one big bedroom, to line the walls in the living room with bookcases and to really build up the rooftop garden with varieties of plants he had never heard of but which he agreed sounded lovely. She showed him where everything would go, taking him up the stairs—to the room she and he and John had sat in the previous week—as ideas came to her in rapid succession, detailing her plan with wide, sweeping gestures of her arms, spilling her drink here and there as she paced the empty rooms. If she was still upset about the events at the party, she didn’t seem to show it.

Julia detailed all the work she'd put into this room, the one that the dentist had said needed a bit of TLC. Paul could see that now; he could see sections where the interior walls had been patched; there were some small areas left to fill, and she had these holes stuffed with ragged strips of pantyhose, and it seemed to help cut the chill, especially with the radiators on. A large section of the ceiling was stained. The closet door had no knob; the floorboards were rough. He didn’t have the faintest idea how to fix any of it, but he had the sudden handyman desire to get elbows deep in a bucket of plaster, to fix the holes and paint wide swaths of the room in the brightest colours. He grinned at the simple domesticity of the vision in his head: he in a pair of plaster-caked overalls, an old t-shirt, Julia with paint in her hair and spackling her feet, laughing with a brush in her hand…

For now, this room was cozy. She had rearranged things since his last visit, to accommodate the ground floor redecoration mostly; a desk was set up in the corner and a wobbly bookshelf sat opposite, filled with books and magazines and a few choice albums from her record collection. A little light sat atop the desk, and when she switched it on, the room was bathed in butterscotch warmth. He could see photos on the desk and lining the walls, dozens of them that reflected his youth and hers, none of which had been hung the week before. A photo of the Albert Docks, or the Royal Liver Building at sunset; street signs clustered around a photo of the entrance to the Cavern Club. He smiled at the sudden flood of recollections the images brought forth.

But it was the cluster of photos on the window wall that caught his attention.

There, a dozen or so black frames highlighted the best memories he had of the year and a half that he and Julia had been _he and Julia_. Photos of him and George in someone’s backyard, sitting on a bench with their guitars; John and Pete brooding on the Penny Lane bus; John hopping the wall into to Strawberry Field; a closeup black and white shot showcasing the stage the night of one of their theatre performances, taken from the side of the stage looking up, with John in the foreground and Paul and George sharing a harmony on the mic beside him.

In the centre of it all was that photo collage he remembered from the Liverpool bedsit down the street from Mona’s; they’d been arranged in frames instead of being tacked into the plaster. He took the time to look at it, to really study it, in a way he hadn’t done when he’d first laid eyes on it. He remembered the photos from their early Society meetings and recognised John in his turban and himself, wearing a ridiculous _keffiyeh_ fashioned out of a flower-print skirt and bound to his head with his own belt. There were some of Julia, assuming the stance for the opening incantation and one of her mock singing into a toothbrush with Paul’s brother Mike grinning impishly and reverently beside her.

But his favourite, the most evocative, was the one of her sitting in front of a candle, her face lit warmly by the glowing flame as she rested her chin on her hands. Her eyes were trained on the light, inches from her face. He couldn’t remember who took it—part of him thought it might have been Mike, who had attended one or two of the Society meetings when Paul had had them at their place. But it didn’t matter. It was beautifully lit and wonderfully composed, and in that one image there was more conveyed about Julia—about her sadness, her introspection, her wisdom and her naivete—than in all the conversations and confessionals she’d given before.

And here she was, standing in front of him, still talking a blue streak about plans for the house she was subletting but which, from the way she was talking, she might as well have purchased outright. Paul tore his eyes away from the photo and watched her with a mixture of awe and admiration. Scarcely six years earlier, she’d been the shyest, quietest girl in Liverpool; yet here she was, planning her life in the capital. If anyone had told Paul that he’d be watching her like this someday, he would have called them crazy.

“You know, Julia,” he said finally, “Yer quite something.”

She was in mid-sentence, her mouth hanging open around the word “contractor”. Faint light from the hallway and the desk lamp behind her and the moon slanting in through the window all glowed against her skin and highlighted the delicate features she’d developed: the fineness of her nose; the curve of her mouth and her cheeks, especially as she blushed and asked him: “You think?”; the slight hollow below her cheekbone and the one at the base of her throat. He walked to the window, facing the back garden, hoping it would help him cool down and lessen the chances of Julia seeing his agitation.

“Oh it’s so _bizarre!_ ” she said. “But I ‘ad a dream about you last night. Just like this,” she whispered.

At that, he snapped to attention. “Really? Because I had—”

“Me first,” she grinned, unsteady on her feet, and Paul stopped talking. “I was sittin’ here—” she motioned to her desk, “—and you climbed up through that window. You were wearin’ a ridiculous wig and you’d made me a birthday cake with strawberry icing…,” she laughed. “How strange! To dream about you, and for you to dream about me.” She smiled. "Maybe it was the same dream."

Paul recalled a faraway conversation, years removed from their current one, on a bench in a park beneath a blanket and a canopy of cotton candy clouds. _I had a dream about you last night... do you remember it?_

Had that actually happened? It felt like a memory he'd imagined wholecloth. Like so much of their pre-fame days, it was nostalgia-tinged, sepia and faded, even though it wasn't all that long ago.  _The bruises on her face were still fresh..._

He shook his head. “‘Ey, isn’t your actual birthday comin’ up?” Paul asked. He felt awful about not remembering the date; if memory served, he’d only actually celebrated it with her once, in the upstairs bedroom of John’s aunt’s place, in a room filled with candles.

She smiled. “It was Tuesday.”

Paul grinned. “Happy belated.”

“Ta,” she replied, growing shy but seeming to be genuinely pleased.

“I’m sorry I forgot,” Paul said, not sure why he’d said it or what he’d intended to follow it with. _Now what?_ he asked himself. It was pitch black outside; the moon slanted in through the window, creating a cool white pool on the floorboards. Paul dipped his toe into it. “I did have a dream about you, though.”

She looked at him. “Really?”

He blushed. “Well, it’s not a big deal, ‘s just… strange, and it’s been ‘appening for the last week or so.”

“You’ve had this dream more than once?” she asked.

Paul felt his pulse quicken. He rested his hands on the windowsill behind him. “A handful of times, yes.”

She raised and lowered her eyebrows with a bit of surprise.

“Does that make you feel strange?” Paul asked.

She shook her head. “No, I just… well.” She fingered the edge of her glass but never finished her thought.

“It does make you uncomfortable, doesn’t it?”

“No, I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t ‘ave to.”

She sighed. “I thought we could be friends, s’all.”

Paul’s agitation flowed over. “And because I have a few recurring dreams about you, suddenly that’s not possible?”

“No, I didn’t mean that—”

“Well why don’t you start saying what you mean, or meaning what you say, or _both_ , for a fuckin’ change.”

She looked over at him; hurt clouded her eyes. “I meant that I don’t think I can stay ‘just friends’, Paul.”

He barely heard her above the sound of his own breathing. It was only when she lowered her eyes and made a show of checking her glass for something that he realised she’d made a confession; a moment of truth passed between them, and he was standing on the very edge of it, staring down into the abyss that had opened up between them…

He pushed himself off the window ledge and crossed the room.

“Julia,” he intoned. She didn’t look up; he hooked his index finger under her chin and gently lifted until she was looking at him. When their eyes met, she tore her face away, stumbling back on half-drunk legs.

“Oh Paul, get over yerself. You think yer such a charmer.”

“What d’you mean by that?”

She sighed and rolled her eyes. “I meant that I really hate you and I don’t want t’ ‘ear about yer dreams, all right?”

Paul sighed. “I don’t know why everything has to be a fight with you.”

“It doesn’t.”

“I wish you would just tell me.”

She looked up at him then, her eyes glinting in the silver shards of moonlight reflecting off the bare walls, and twisted her lips into a grimace that didn’t suit her. “What d’you want me to tell you, Paul?”

For a brief few moments he said nothing. He wanted to—desperately—and the words were there, threatening his lips, but something told him that words weren’t what she wanted to hear. They weren’t what he wanted to give, either.

Paul watched as her eyes moved away from his face, disappointed that he hadn’t replied yet; she pursed her lips and seemed to shift her weight onto her other foot in preparation to walk away; his arms shot out to hold her fast, and they gripped her shoulders as soon as they found them; startled, she spun to face him, her eyes wide; he scarcely had time to look where he was headed, whether she wanted him to head there, but even if he’d had time the darkness around them would have rendered the scene impossible to see. He blindly leaned forward to kiss her, truly, for the first time in years.

From the moment his lips touched hers until the moment she pulled away, Paul tried to absorb as much of the sensations as he could. He inhaled her scent—a mixture of vanilla and lavender and scotch and warm skin and saliva. He memorized the way their mouths fit together—nestled, stacked, his top lip, her top lip, his bottom lip, her bottom lip. He listened to the sounds—his throaty growl and her softly whimpered response as she ran her teeth over his bottom lip, drawing him into her mouth, sucking on him. He tasted her—the sweetness of her mouth and the sweetness of the scotch, different but familiar. He imprinted the way it felt to have her hands tugging at his hips, or the way he thought he could almost circle her entire waist with his hands if he tried, such was the waifishness of her body.

But she flattened her palms against the front of his shirt and pushed him away. “I can’t, Paul,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. She stood so close, he could feel her heat still.

“Why not?”

“It’s not like it was before.”

“It can be,” he sighed, “We can get back there.”

“No, there’s too much now. It’s just too much to take in. Too much to fight.”

“Forget it,” he said, closing his eyes and dropping his head to rest a cheek against the side of her head. “Forget it all. _This_ feels so—”

“ _Wrong_ ,” she whispered, tilting her head up to kiss him, “It feels wrong.”

“Julia,” the word came up from deep within his throat. He separated each syllable, Ju-li-a, instead of running it all together the way he normally did. He liked the way it vibrated against his sternum that way, resonating next to the songs he hadn’t written and lines he hadn’t sung, not yet, but which he’d write and sing for her if only she’d ask him to. “Julia… Julia…” His lips found her forehead.

“Paul, I just—”

“Don’t tell me you can’t,” he begged, kissing her eyelids. “Please don’t tell me you can’t.”

“I—”

“Please, Julia,” he kissed her hair. “Please.”

She softened; her arms, holding him back, relaxed; he felt her molding to him. He knew he’d won. He gripped her tighter, throwing his arms around her and kissing her with more force, more intensity.

Whether it was he dragging her up the stairs or her dragging him, he didn’t know. Within minutes, they were flattening each other against the walls of the staircase leading to the third floor and Julia’s bedroom. Hands on bodies, mouths on skin, fingers unbuttoning, tearing, _clawing_. Growls and groans, straining, pulling, pushing. He laid her on the bed, finally covered her body with his. They tried making quick work of the layers that stretched between them—his shirt, her smock—and tangled themselves up in no time. With nervous laughter, they tried again, starting with the kisses.

But it was clumsy and graceless, inelegant. Even Paul, experienced as he was, was thrown off by Julia’s sudden, unexpected lack of expertise. Whether from drink or nerves, he couldn’t tell. But she fumbled with his belt and suddenly he couldn’t manage the waistband of her shorts or the tangled mess than had become her loose-fitting sweater; she bumped her forehead into his nose trying to lift her head to kiss him, and suddenly he felt like a buffoon, a big awkward ape pawing at her. The erotic urgency, the edge, was gone; his desire for her vanished. He took a breath and rested his forehead against hers, closed his eyes.

“Relax, okay,” he whispered. “Yer makin’ me all edgy… .”

“Okay,” she whispered. He tried to calm himself. Rhythmically, they began to breathe in sync with one another. He kissed her more deeply and, pressed against the curves of her body, the softness of her breasts pushed up against him, with his hands resting on womanly hips, he expected to feel _something_ . _Anything_.

He felt nothing.

Julia pulled away, turning her face away and freeing her lips to speak.

“Paul—”

He groaned and pressed a hand to his eyes. “Julia… I just—”

She kissed his cheek after a moment’s pause, her lips scratching the fine fuzz of stubble coating his face. “No, let’s not.”

“S’okay,” he whispered, reaching between them to grip himself. Beneath him, Julia’s breathing deepened; he heard her sigh, exasperated, and he felt more frustrated with himself than ever before. He squeezed his hand around the base, stroking with such fervor that he feared he’d tear it off if he wasn’t careful. Why had he let her mix the drink? Why did he have to drink so much of it? He squeezed his eyes shut and grunted as he tried to push his way into her anyway.

“No Paul!” she said, more firmly than he’d expected. He opened his eyes and looked down into hers, blown wide with fear. Gone was the fuzziness from the drink, the passion from his kisses, replaced with absolute terror. He'd never seen her look that way before.

Without a second thought, he rolled off, and Julia pulled her sweater up from the end of the bed.

“Jesus, Julia…”

She put her hands over her face and shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

“I mean… was I hurtin’ you? I didn’t mean to.”

“It’s fine, really,” she said. “Maybe it’s just the wrong time.”

Paul wasn’t listening; he was frustrated, and angry, and hornier than hell, but in front of all of that was confusion. She had looked at him as though he were a monster.

He suddenly felt like one.

He stared at the ceiling; Julia pulled her sweater over her head, drawing her legs up to her chest. He watched her breathe, slowly and deliberately, trying to calm herself.

He hesitated to reach out to her, to touch her, but when he did, she turned to face him and smiled. It was uncanny; it was as if nothing had happened. She curled up beside him, stretching her arm across his chest, and kissed him on the shoulder. “Paul?”

“Yeh?”

“Why don’t we just lie here, like the old days,” she smiled. “You could read to me.”

Paul looked down at her, seeing the top of her head and nothing else. He wrapped an arm around her shoulder, his body thrumming, his heart aching. “Yes, let’s.”

She sprung up from the bed and rummaged for a moment before returning, bringing with her the dog-eared and cloth-covered volume of Joyce’s _Dubliners_ that he remembered. When she rejoined him, she flicked on a small reading lamp on the bedside table; in the warm glow of incandescent light, the playful childishness he once saw in Julia’s face seemed to have returned. When she placed the book in his hands and snuggled up next to him, she was a girl, not a woman. The transformation was unnerving.

Yet he opened the book to where her bookmark rested. Julia rested her head against his neck, her ear over his chest, because she liked the sound of his voice as it resonated, too. Paul then cleared his throat and began to read: “Mr. James Duffy lived in Chapelizod… .”

Julia was sleeping before too long, but Paul finished the story. Why Julia was so entranced by the collection, Paul was still not quite sure. In the years he’d been without her, he’d often come across the book, in someone’s library or another, in hotels and on airplanes. Every time, he re-read “The Dead”; it was by far his favourite, evoking the strongest images and reactions from him each time he read it. The other stories bothered him. They were too dark, too dirty, too depressing. There was no hope in Joyce’s Dublin, or for his poor Dubliners. Paul wished he could rewrite the endings, make them all happy, given them a reason to smile.

Of them all, however, Paul disliked “A Painful Case” the most, and that was a fact. The sentence that made him wince every time he read it was found within its few, sparse pages: “Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse,” wrote Mr. Duffy to poor Mrs. Sinico, “and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.”

He’d read the line over and over, every time he ever opened that book and again on this night, turning the ideas over in his mind before setting the book down and carefully reaching over Julia’s sleeping frame to turn out the light. For the second time that night, Paul stood on the threshold of an agonizing choice, not knowing which reality he’d prefer: one in which James Duffy was right, or one in which he was wrong.

* * *

PAUL: So, that was how we started up again.

MURPHY: _That_ didn’t take long.

PAUL: Inside a week. ( _Pause_ ) I wasn’t always very discreet about it. In the beginning John knew, obviously. Brian figured it out too. He surprised me with his response, Brian did. He never liked confrontations, but he remembered all too well the night two years earlier when the police had shown up, and he wasn’t too keen on me—or any one of us—getting mixed up with someone who might be in trouble. But I remember him calling me into his office one day and saying three words to me: “Safe, careful, and discreet.” He wasn’t going to stand in the way of anyone’s happiness so long as those three criteria were met. And I knew then that he understood, better than most, because that’s who he was. ( _Pause_ ) It wasn’t long until George and Ringo found out too. And at first I didn’t think any of them cared, really. But George wasn’t too happy. I know that for a fact...


	30. Something New

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: "[Turncoat](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZawJKmR_pU)"

* * *

 20 December 1966  
Kinfauns  
Esher, Surrey

“Nice tan,” Paul quipped, reaching over to tap out a rhythm against the sunburned forearm of The Beatles’ lead guitarist before lifting his hand and slapping it down just hard enough to make George cry out.

“F-f-fuck Paul!” George yelped. He winced as Paul tittered, taking a hit from the joint they were sharing.

“Sunblock next time.”

“Pink always _was_ my colour,” George said through gritted teeth.

Paul laughed and turned back to the television in the corner. The guitar he’d been playing—upside down, owing to the right-handed tuning; Paul’s hands had seized up quickly around the awkwardly flipped chord formations—lay abandoned beside him on the floor. He’d been at George’s house for a little over an hour, playing songs and smoking pot and watching television, which is something he’d normally do at John’s, only John was expecting company that afternoon and Paul didn’t feel much like socializing. The alternative was Sunday at the Asher house, and as much as he enjoyed spending time with Jane’s family, there was only so much he could really handle.

But that wasn’t the real reason he’d elected to drive to the southwest that day…

Paul swallowed. “Spent a lot of time in the pool then, did you?”

“It’s the Caribbean,” George said. “You don’t swim in a pool when you have an ocean.”

Paul chuckled. “How’s Pattie?” he asked. “Lobster tanned as well, is she?”

George cast a sidelong glance into the house. “She’s sleeping,” he drawled. “As I’d rather be doing.”

The words stung but Paul shrugged them off. “I can go,” he gestured toward the door.

George cast him a look. “Would you?” he asked, a cheeky grin on his face.

Paul half-laughed. “You could’ve told me not to come.”

George shrugged and took another hit, holding it in his lungs. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” he said around the exhale. “Speaking of: how’s Ringo?”

Paul laughed, recalling their conversation just before Ringo had gone under. “Tonsil-less but very much alive,” Paul said. “And still talking like a cartoon character.”

George chuckled as he settled back deeper into his armchair. “I’m sure he’ll be better for the Christmas shows.”

“Otherwise you’re singing his songs,” Paul said as he picked up the guitar again.

George laughed. “Not likely…”

The two friends lapsed into silence, punctuated only occasionally by the odd rustle of fabric, clearing of a throat. Paul flexed his left hand around the guitar’s neck, suddenly very nervous; he had no earthly reason to be—George was one of his oldest friends—but nevertheless… .

George, on his right, with his ankle on the opposite knee, simply sat, eyeing him. As if he knew. Paul decided quickly that _that’s_ what was doing it; the knowing intensity of George’s gaze. Paul’s heartbeat rattled his eardrums. With one sweaty palm, he felt the inside pocket of his sport coat. _Still there_ , he thought, though it did little to lessen his anxiety. He closed his eyes and breathed.

“Out with it, Paul,” George said finally.

“What are you on about?”

George was undeterred. “Surely you didn’t come all the way out ‘ere to rib me about my sunburn or talk about the Christmas show,” he said. “What’s really going on?”

Paul felt his face redden. “Well I’ve got presents for you both. That’s one reason. And can’t a bloke pop ‘round and visit a mate who’s been on holiday?”

“Paul…”

Paul sighed and shut his eyes. The nervous thrum of his heartbeat telegraphed itself into the bounce of his knee. He set the guitar down beside him again. “Might as well…” he whispered to himself as he once again shut his eyes and reached into the pocket, pulling out the small green velvet ring box he’d been carrying around with him for a handful of days already. He turned it over in his hand a few times before leaning over to hand it to George.

“Yer not gonna even get down on one knee?” George joked.

Paul still red in the face, proffered the box with a nod of his head and a shake of his wrist, and George took it and opened it. A simple diamond solitaire sat inside. George nodded approvingly.

“So yer finally gonna make an honest woman out of Jane, are you?”

Paul sighed and shook his head. “It’s not for Jane.”

George looked up from the box, and in that moment, he knew. Paul could see it in his eyes, that unmistakable look of disappointment and resignation. He closed the box and handed it back to Paul. “How long?”

Paul shrugged. “Two weeks. Not quite.”

George was incredulous. “You’re ready to marry ‘er after two weeks?”

Another shrug, this time followed by a longer pause. “It’s been longer than that. It’s been damn near four years now. And I love ‘er, George. I’ve never stopped loving her.”

George took a breath and held it; Paul could tell that the younger man was considering all of his options before speaking. Finally, he spoke.

“You’re not in Liverpool anymore, Paul.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” George asked. “Because I’m not sure you do.”

“George—”

But George wasn’t finished. “We stood, the four of us, and we agreed that Julia was off limits. That that’s what was best for the band, for everyone.”

“That’s not how I remember it.”

He sighed. “Look. I’m willing to take part of the blame here because I’m the one who let the cat out of the bag about Julia this time, and I already got an earful from ‘im over it.” He shook his head. “If John’d had his way, I doubt he would have told you at all.”

Paul looked up at George. “That’s not true,” he countered. “We talked about it, me ’n him. Things are fine. We’ve put it all behind us. He even more or less gave me his blessing.”

“If that’s true,” George began, “Then why are you sitting here showing me Julia’s engagement ring and not him?”

Paul’s silence was more than answer enough. “I don’t know.”

George’s silence spoke volumes more than his words ever could. But when he did eventually speak, it was with a depth of wisdom that belied his young age. Paul felt as though he was being scolded by a headmaster.

“It’s because you know as well as anyone that he’s not over her. He just doesn’t have the energy for it now. He knows that this—all of this—it’s more trouble than it’s worth.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you knew…”

George shrugged. “Well maybe that’s true.”

Paul looked at the ring box in his hand. “I don’t want to lose her again, George.”

“She’s not yours to lose, Paul,” George came back. “She never has been. And if you go through with it…” George leaned back against his chair. “What about Jane?”

Paul shrugged. “What about ‘er?”

George shook his head. “You used to be such a romantic. But you’re not thinkin’ with yer head,” he said, adding: “At least not with the right one, anyway.”

Paul pocketed the ring again and slapped his hands on his thighs. “Good talk, George,” he said, standing up and readying himself to leave.

“Paul,” George sighed as he stood up and moved to intercept him.

Paul stopped, whirling around to face George. “I don’t need anyone’s permission to do what I want in my personal life, you know,” he said.

“But if yer personal life explodes, suddenly it’s our neck on the line,” George offered. “Have you forgotten how this ended last time?”

Paul rolled his eyes. “‘Course not. But I can’t base everything on what John wants or what John doesn’t want, George,” Paul said, pausing for a moment before wheeling on him. “And since when did you become so protective of him anyway?”

It was George’s turn to express his disbelief; with a roll of his eyes, he shook his head. “It’s not John I’m protecting, Paul.” He sighed. “You’re not thinkin’ about Julia much in all this, are yeh? After everything she’s been through, you’d put ‘er through that? You’d ask her to take all that?”

Paul pointed a finger at George. “You don’t know the first thing about what Julia’s been through, what she’s already survived,” he said.

George’s eyes narrowed. “I could guess.”

“You couldn’t,” Paul replied. "You haven’t the faintest idea. You’ve _no clue_ what I know. What she’s told me.”

“Try me.”

Paul briefly considered it, but waved his hand at George dismissively instead.

George continued undeterred. “You don’t realise that whatever you think this is, it’s not going to pan out the way you want. Except now it’s in front of the world’s press, and thousands of fans. It’s not just the crowd in the Cavern who’s got t’ look at yer busted noses. And it’s not just you and John, either. It’s me, it’s Ring. It’s our lives and the people in them. It’s Brian. It’s everyone at EMI.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I wish you hadn’t told me any of this. I don’t want any part in this… this _soap opera_.” He gestured to the ring in Paul’s pocket. “If I were you I’d return that ring, or lose it, forget it. Nothing good’ll come of this.”

Paul scoffed. “Some friend you are.”

“I’m tellin’ you this _because_ I’m yer friend, Paul,” George said, his voice just this side of pleading. “You can fuck whomever you want, or don’t fuck them, or whatever it is you want to do. But marriage…” he shook his head again. “The way we ‘ad to keep Cyn a secret from the fans, remember that? And remember the way they treated ‘er after they found out?”

Paul steadied his breathing. “If I want to marry her, George, I’m gonna ask ‘er to marry me. And there’s nothing you can say that’ll discourage me.”

George took a breath and looked down at his hands. Paul, too, glanced down at his friend’s hands, sunburned and chapped; his previous high seemed to return, briefly, as he stared with fascination at George’s fingernails.

Finally, George spoke. “He’s really not over her, Paul.”

Paul looked at George and then down at the floor. He would have been lying if he said he hadn’t considered it. Of course he had. But John had never been a serious contender for Julia’s affections, had he?

“If that’s true,” Paul croaked out, “Then that’s his problem, not mine.”

George took a long moment size up his bandmate before shrugging. “Then there’s really nothing more to say then, is there?”

“‘Spose not.”

Paul pulled on his coat. George shoved his hands into his pockets.

“Where did you buy it?” he asked. “The ring.”

Paul instinctively reached up to feel the box in his pocket. “Personal shopping service,” he said. “This jeweller, he brought me a couple dozen rings to choose from. Came to the office a few days ago.”

George nodded. “Is this why I’m reading in the _Daily Express_ that you’re ready to get hitched?”

Paul groaned. “The _Daily Express_ makes up whatever it wants to print, George,” he said. “I didn’t know you even read it.”

“I don’t,” he said. “But Pattie does. And Pattie and Jane…”

Paul nodded, the meaning perfectly clear.

As Paul set out again for the city, he focused on his driving, ignoring the pulse of marijuana still clouding his mind, far more fearful of the tremor in his hands that came from being challenged on something he knew he was probably wrong about. Adrenaline coursed through his veins. Twice, he pulled over to the side of the road to collect himself before continuing.

George’s last words to him rang out in his head the entire time:

_Be careful._

* * *

PAUL: It was dark when I got back into London and the first thing I did was drive straight to the mews house. But Julia wasn’t home. It’s probably a good thing too, because I was in the frame of mind where I might have asked her right then and there to marry me. Who knows how that would have turned out?

  
MURPHY: What did you do with the ring?

  
PAUL: Took it back to the Asher’s, dropped it into my sock drawer, and promptly forgot about it. ( _Pause_ ) Because George was right and I knew it. I was daft to have ever thought otherwise…


	31. What If?

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: "[What If](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMwfVabfsAY)"

* * *

JOHN: I was never happy at home.

WILSON: Why is that?

JOHN: I was all bogged down. The weight of it all was starting to get to be too much. We were already talking about not touring again, it was getting to that point. It was just madness. And on top of it all, with my home life not exactly measuring up—

WILSON: But you had Julia?

JOHN: Well… _a lot of people_ had Julia…

* * *

20 December 1964  
Kenwood  
Weybridge, Surrey

John had forgotten about his afternoon visitor. This was in spite of the fact that he'd made those plans days in advance, and the fact that he had been reminded of it only an hour earlier when Paul had called to see if John would be home and he'd told him in no uncertain terms that he was busy. But between then and now, John had forgotten about it entirely.

As he marched down the hallway to answer the door, his anger at being interrupted subsided and he was struck by a sudden interest. He remembered who it would be.

John ignored the butterflies in his stomach and threw open the door without checking to see first.

“Hello, John,” Julia smiled. She stood on the doorstep, frosted by snow, holding an armload of parcels in front of her. Behind her, in the driveway, was the same white Citroën she’d driven around Liverpool all those years ago.

He’d forgotten that she’d told him she wanted to visit, in their last telephone call a few days earlier, that he’d given her his address.

“Julia.”

She let out a chuckle. “I come bearing gifts and—” she cut her sentence off midway through as the top parcel in the bunch began to slide off the top; she swerved to catch it, balancing the rest in her arms, and John held out a hand to steady the pile.

He swallowed, pushing past the awkward nerves that surrounded him. “Gifts fer me?”

“For you, and Cynthia, and little Julian?”

John nodded. “You didn’t ‘ave to do that.”

“Nonsense,” she replied. “But if you don’t mind, my arms are gonna fall off if I don’t set these down.”

He stepped aside to let her in and she took the invitation, striding across the threshold and setting her gifts—four in all—on the table beside the door, before changing her mind and taking up a carefully wrapped plate of Christmas baking she’d brought back into her hands. “Is Cynthia around?”  
John shook his head and forgot his voice; he cleared his throat and replied. “No,” he said, without bothering with an elaboration.

“Oh,” Julia said, looking down at the baking. “Well, I wanted to bring these. I don’t know if she bakes, but I know she mentioned not bein’ very good at it or liking it much, once upon a time. And I thought maybe with Julian still small and this bein’ the first Christmas here n’ all that…”

John took the plate from her and nodded. “Thank you.”

She blushed. “Yes well, silly me! I made way too much for meself but I couldn’t stop. I ‘ad enough t’ give to everyone—Patti and George, Ringo and Mo, Paul and Jane,” she nodded, trailing off, but smiled just as quickly. “Even Brian got some. Left a box at the office.”

It was endearing, the way she seemed to overcompensate, and John couldn’t help but view the cookies and gingerbread on the covered plate in his hands with the tenderest of emotions.

“Would you like to—?”

“Thanks,” she smiled, “Though I shouldn’t stay too long. It’s really comin’ down out there.”

John didn’t feel it prudent to suggest that she could stay as long as she wanted, that Cynthia and Julian wouldn’t be returning until the next day, that she could sleep in one of the spare rooms, or, better yet—

“Well, I was just writin’—”

Inside, John grimaced. _Way to blow it, Johnny!_ he fumed at himself.

Julia took a moment before turning and putting her hand on the doorknob. “Oh, well, in that case.”

“No,” John shook his head, staying Julia’s hand. “I meant that I was _trying_ to write. Unsuccessfully.” He huffed. “I’m not kickin’ you out, is all I meant.” He looked down at the plate. "I forgot you were comin' over, that's all."

Julia half-smiled. "Yer a clever one," she teased. The look on her face grew serious as she stood up tall. “I really don’t mind if you wanna kick me out.”

John shook his head. “This house is far too big for me on my own right now.”

She smiled. “All right then.”

He motioned to where she should leave her coat and retreated into the house to put away the baking. When he came back, Julia was arranging the presents underneath the decorated Christmas tree in the corner.

“I wait until closer to Christmas Eve to decorate,” she said.

“We would,” John replied, “‘Cept we’ve got two shows on Christmas Eve, so it would never get done. And Julian wanted to help. So.”

“It’s nice to ‘ave it up,” she said.

John nodded. He hated the way he suddenly felt and sounded like so many of the old men he’d seen or heard growing up in Woolton, chatting over garden gates about grandchildren or wives or spinster sisters in the church chorus, nodding and waxing philosophical on matters of local gossip. Suburbia seemed destined to run through his veins until the day he died; he felt his heart sink at the prospect.

“So,” he cleared his throat. “How’s life for the suddenly posh Julia Fitzpatrick?”

Julia’s back straightened. “Fine,” she said with a shake of her head, her long tresses falling into her eyes. “Busy. But fine.”

She giggled for some reason as John watched, overcome with tenderness towards her. He cleared his throat against the emotion and she looked up.

“What’s that?” she asked. “Why are you looking at me?

Her voice was so soft John had to strain to hear her. “How’s the dating game?” he changed the subject, suddenly very uncomfortable.

Julia flicked her eyes to his, and John couldn’t tell if she was angry or annoyed or fearful, because all those emotions and more danced across her eyes. He felt his stomach drop out.

“What? Did I say something wrong?” he asked. “You _are_ dating? Playing the field?”

She nodded a bit, the look on her face falling away and replaced with a kind of sad relief. “Yeah,” she sighed. “Yeah, you could say that.”

 _Why are you such a fuckin’ bastard?_ John asked himself as he watched her get up and peruse his book in the bookshelves as a means of extrication. He plotted a way to get out of the mess into which he’d managed to drag their conversation. But she broke the silence with a bubbly laugh.

“You still ‘ave this thing?” she grinned, pulling the black leather journal off the shelf.

John felt his face grow red as he remembered the night all those years ago when she'd slid the book into his hands on the top deck of a Liverpool bus after a night of rambling along the docks after a collegiate art show. For a moment, he thought he was back there.

He suddenly wished he was _there_ , and not _here_.

“Yeah," he said finally. "I’m sorry I didn’t return it but… .”

She thumbed through the pages. “This is pure crap, the lot of it, innit?”

“It’s not Proust,” John replied. “But it’s alright.”

Julia let her hand trail down one of the pages before turning it over. “You read through it all then?”

“I did.”

“You enjoyed it?”

“Sure.”

“It’s rubbish.”

“It’s...  _imaginative_.”

She leaned against the mantle. “I don’t understand you John. In the newspapers and magazines, you’re so critical of things, sometimes, and yet when you’re faced with what might be the most horrid piece of shite in the whole o’ the Commonwealth, you say it’s ‘imaginative’?” she chortled. “This?” she held up the book, “This is crap.”

John looked at her through mystified eyes. He didn’t know whether to yell at her for being so daft or laugh at her for being so delightful. Still, she held the book tightly against her chest, despite all her own misgivings about its content.

“You ‘ave a lot of Joyce in here,” she stated matter-of-factly, motioning to his bookshelves. “Several duplicates, actually.”

He locked on her gaze. “Is that so?”

“You don’t know the content of your own book collection?”

“Most of it is Cynthia’s,” he lied. “Or I buy a book because I like the way it looks and then I never read it.”

“That’s no way to live a literary life.”

“Who said I want to live a literary life?”

“Well you wrote a book, didn’t you?”

“That’s a scandalous lie,” he snorted. “I can barely read.”

Julia grinned. “You’re full of it.”

“Lots of people write books,” he shrugged. “Doesn’t make them scholars.”

She let a thoughtful pause elapse. “I want to read everything,” she thumbed through her book again, then closed it in her hand. “I want to recognise meself in someone’s book one day.”

“What do you mean?”

She smiled fondly, tracing her fingers along the spines on the shelf. “I wanna pick up a book an’ read a passage about a girl walkin’ into a store, with a black coat an’ knee-high boots, with an air about her that suggests something but you just don’t know what, an’ I wanna read that she took twenty minutes decidin’ how much milk to buy or tried to pay with exact change at the register, and then I wanna say ‘A ha! That’s me! I did that!’ I want somebody to see me, lock me in their memory, and pull me out when they need t’ write a scene with a girl at a cash register.” She shrugged again, still playing. “I don’t ‘ave to be the main character. I guess it doesn’t even have t’ be a book. I just wanna be there, in it. Immortalized somehow.”

John looked down finally. “I think that’s daft.”

Julia laughed. “I think it’s romantic.”

“Nobody’s ever going to write a story about me, so why should I go lookin’ for it? Actin’ like it’ll happen?”

Julia glanced at the leather bound volume she still clutched protectively against her chest. When she looked back up at him, her eyes had softened considerably; she seemed to be smiling from those two shining points alone. “Then I guess you never really read this, did you?”

John knew exactly what she was getting at; once again, without breaking their eye contact, he half-grinned at her. “And you, who _looks_ to be immortalized, must be the only person on the planet who ‘asn’t listened to our last four records. _Really_ listened.”

Julia scoffed.

It felt like a challenge, her dismissal. He straightened imperceptibly. “You’re all over our songs. You live inside those words,” he said, his voice cracking. “You had to have known that.”

“Come off it, Lennon,” Julia said. “I’m not in the mood…” The apples of her cheeks flushed to the most delicate shade of rose as she put the book back on the shelf and made a move to cross the room; John saw her ten steps ahead of where she was and intercepted her at the door, moving as swiftly as he’d ever moved in his life.

“Yer not leavin.’” His voice was husky, breathless; gripping her by the shoulders, he could feel her trembling. “Not again.”

“No?” she asked.

“You asked me once if I fancied yeh,” he half-whispered. “You said you weren’t that lucky. Remember?”

“I remember.”

“Well,” he swallowed, feeling brave. “If me wanting you is all it takes… well then, Julia, you’re the luckiest woman I know.”

It was a terrible line and John knew that the moment the words left his mouth; he felt so stupid. Julia was too smart for something that trite. She’d see right through it, and then he’d be exposed as a cheap flirt and a liar to boot—because he was no catch, not the kind of guy to make any woman lucky to have him, and he was sure that everyone knew it. But he’d said it, the words were out there, still echoing in his mind and in the space between them, and he couldn’t take them back.

Julia didn’t recoil, or laugh, or roll her eyes the he feared she would. She trembled even harder in his hands, and over the buzzing thud of his own heart in his ears, he heard her humming a distant melody. Slowly, unsteadily, her voice produced the words that he’d been writing on that night all those years ago.

“ _So I hope you see… that I… would love to love you…”_

If it was possible to feel more elation, more tenderness, John couldn’t figure out how. As her voice broke on the highest note, her sob cracked through her chest and she closed her eyes. John leaned in, closing the gap between them, and kissed her, because it seemed like the right thing to do.

When she kissed him back he knew he’d gambled and won for the first time in a very long time.

The years that had passed between their first kiss and this one had not dulled the edges of John’s memory of it; in fact, as her pliant lips parted and he drew her closer to taste the fullness of her, the familiarity of it all struck him solidly in the centre of his chest, forcing a shuddering breath deep into lungs his that threatened to jerk them apart. He had to wrap his arms even tighter around her to keep them both there.

All the clues were there. He heard soft keens coming from the base of her throat and deeper, rippling from the core of her, and he laid his hands against her hips, his fingertips pressing and imprinting themselves on her flesh. She stepped into him, arms pitched around his shoulders. Her mouth sat against his, warm and supple, and as she deepened the kiss, he knew his desire for her was matched by hers for him. It made him desire her all the more.

He wanted to see what she could do.

What _they_ could do.

Together.

It was strangely appropriate that they settled for the music room, bypassing floors and beds and countertops in nearly every other room available to them in their harried rush to come together. She fumbled with his pants, his belt and the button fly of his jeans, tripping over guitar stands and knocking sheets of lyric paper off the shelves; he clawed impatiently at the buttons on her dress with one hand, hiking up the skirt and thumbing her panties down with the other. When they broke apart, they laughed into each other’s mouths before growling together again, desperately hungry and deliriously poised to devour.

They finally made it to the piano, John backing Julia against the keys before lifting her onto the ivories. He spread her knees, stood between them and kissed her as the dissonant chords she sat on rang out into the space.

He stopped then, suddenly aware of his own need to remember this moment, record it in his mind. The raucous jangle of the piano had died off, replaced with the _tick-tick-tick_ of the clock on the wall and the faint buzz of one of John’s monitors, switched on across the room, its red light flashing. The air was still, stifling, but Julia’s hands on his chest were ice cold, trembling. She took shallow breaths from the space between them, pulled in through her hesitant smile. He brought his hands up to cup each side of her face, sweeping away strands of her hair from her cheek with his thumb. She smiled at him, catching the pad of his thumb against her lips and kissing it, teasingly gentle. He’d wanted to know if this was what she wanted still, and he’d gotten the answer he was looking for. Leaning forward, pressing his forehead to hers, he shut his eyes and felt her nod against him. She locked her ankles behind his back, pulling them closer together as she angled herself against him. As she tilted her lips up to meet his again, he guided himself within her.

In the moment, he didn’t care if she finished or not. He buried his face in her neck and inhaled her, perfume sprayed on the rise of her breasts and along her collarbone, sweat standing up along her shoulders; Julia’s sharp, quick inhales—one for each rock of his hips into the very heat of her—would have been enough to send him over the edge on their own. He had closed his eyes, focusing on himself, the sensations, intoxicated by the very _idea_ of being with Julia, finally…

But when Julia gasped loudly and threw her head back, John’s eyes flashed open. He saw the flush in her skin, reaching from the base of her throat to the apples of her cheeks; the thin, silver scar along her jaw shone in the light, pulsing as she swallowed, with each sound she uttered. He heard her cry out his name, watched her come apart. He grabbed hold of her around the back and thrust once, twice, and she was unglued, the piano keys singing her orgasm to him and pushing him so far over the edge he heard himself shout, not her name, but indecipherable sounds, nonsense; his eyes squeezed shut as he emptied himself within her.

And when it was done, he struggled to breathe and lay his head on her chest, ear pressed to her breast, listening to the rapid syncopation of her heartbeat.

He pulled out of her after a moment; she slid off the keyboard and into his limply held but waiting arms. Half clothed and in a terrible state of disarray, they grinned at each other a little; Julia rubbed her backside with a knowing smile, then started to straighten herself out, but John stopped her, his warm hands resting on hers.

She closed her eyes and sighed. “That was—” she tried again to button her shirt, but John pressed her hands tighter. She blushed and pulled her hands away, unwilling to let him stop her. “We can’t do this, y’know. This was a one-off. It was great, but you and I both know...”

“Why can’t we?” he demanded softly.

She was silent for a while, as her fingers deftly scaled the front of her shirtdress and slipped ivory buttons through stitched buttonholes. “Three very good reasons: Cynthia, Julian, and—”

In the back of his mind, he knew she was talking about Paul. But he didn’t care. Maybe it was the afterglow—or the setting sun casting warm beams through the clouds at the horizon and colouring his music room in shades of orange, red, and violet, or the fact that Julia had left her taste on his tongue—but she was embedded in him, shards of her replacing his cells and becoming part of his being, and he felt as though he were untouchable. He simply didn’t care about anything else, so long as moments like this existed…

“We just won’t tell them,” John said, nuzzling his nose against her temple. “Or we could tell _everyone_ …”

“John… you know it’ll never be that easy.”

“Why not?”

Julia was silent for a long time, and John took it as a sign that she was considering it, and his spirits lifted. Then she drew in a breath.

“I go out with men for money.”

It wasn’t what he’d expected, but part of him had figured it out; the man he’d seen Julia with on that first night, the fight Paul had witnessed at the club, the fact that she was able to afford a home like hers in centarl London without any pointed indication of any job whatsoever, it all pointed to this conclusion. _The ultimate business arrangement. Oldest in the book. The most logical extension of what she’d told Paul all those years ago._

“Say something, John.”

The thought of it upset him, but not as much as he thought it might. It was no different than imagining her with Paul, only imagining her with Paul was worse. Far worse.

“Sex for money?” he asked.

She was silent again for a long time. “Not always.”

A thought flitted across his mind. “I’m not going to pay you, if that’s what you think.”

Julia looked hurt. “Christ, John, that’s—if that’s what you think—”

He took a breath. “I don’t want you to do this. I don’t like it.”

“That’s nice, John but you can’t always get everything you want,” she said. “Not all of us are millionaires. I need to work.”

“You could get another job.”

“What, and be a secretary somewhere?” she asked with a cold laugh. “You want me to answer your phone? Would you put a cheque in my hand every week? Ten pounds a month—twelve if yer feelin’ generous? What is the going rate these days?”

“I don’t know, you tell me.”

She frowned. “You don’t have to like this, but it’s not up to you, is it? I can live where I want, conduct my business the way I want. I’m beholden to no one. No one tells me what to do.” She looked up at him. “No one owns me. Not anymore.”

John snorted, ignoring her statement, not understanding it. “So you still make all the rules for all your gentlemen callers, do yeh?” he asked instead. “No kissing? No touching? Do they at least get to choose whether they have you on yer back or on yer knees?”

“I told you, John, it’s not always like that.”

“But it is _sometimes_.”

“When I want it to be, yes, it is.” She shook her head sadly. “Why are you being so cruel to me?”

John knew it was true—he was being cruel—but he couldn’t help it. He squeezed his fingers against the palm of his hand instead of speaking up. She was challenging him; he knew that. Challenging him was what Julia did best. He wasn’t about to rise to it any further than he already have; he wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of a reason to hate him. If she was going to reject him, it was going to have to be for reasons of her own making.

“I don’t like what you’re doing,” he said simply.

“Well you don’t have a say.”

“But wouldn’t it be better if I _did_?” he asked. “If your first instinct was to come to me, if you an’ me had a say in everything… if you an’ me—”

She looked up at him then, meeting his eyes for the first time since the conversation began. “Oh John…” she started.

But he continued. “I would provide for you, Julia,” he said. “You would never want for anything ever again. Ever.”

“And where would that leave me? I’d be John Lennon’s mistress then?” she asked. “You have a wife. You have a baby boy. Providing for me on the side… how is that any different than paying me every time we see each other?”

He took the rhetorical pause built into the end of her sentence and used it to button his jeans and straighten his shirt over the waistband. When he was done, Julia stepped forward and slipped her arms around his waist, breathing him in deeply through the thin fabric of his turtleneck sweater.

“I’ve wanted this for so long, John,” she whispered. “Let’s not ruin today by talking it to death… saying things we don’t mean, that we’ll regret…”

Her confession surprised him. In all the years he’d known her, he had always wanted to believe she wanted him back, just as badly as he wanted her, but never dared to let himself hope that it could be true. Now that it was, he didn’t know what to do with himself. This wasn’t what he’d expected; it’s not what he wanted. Like light through a prism, he was scattered; with a word, Julia could gather him back up again, hold him in her hands. And in spite of everything—all the unpleasantness of her revelation, the looming spectre of his wife and his best friend—he suddenly wanted nothing more than to live in her pocket or to be put piece by piece inside her, to nestle next to that most secret of places. So when she did it, whispered the words that made him whole again—“Happy Crimble, John”—he thought himself the happiest man in England. Wrapped in her arms, reconstituted and recast in the role she had created for him to fill, it was the only place he wanted to be, and damn the rest of it entirely.

“I don’t want this to be the only time,” he said.

She smiled up at him. “We’ll see.”

It would have to do.

John had placed an uncharacteristically loving kiss on the tip of her nose. He didn’t want to ruin the moment, thinking about the bad things their union could produce, even though somewhere, deep down, a part of him knew she was right when she told him again just how impossible it would be.

On Christmas morning, when Cynthia found Julia’s gifts under the tree and passed them around, she seemed pleasantly surprised; the baking, she’d said, had been gift enough without the books for Julian, bedtime stories and nursery rhymes and a promise that Auntie Julia would help teach him to read one day, or the delicate jewelry box with Cynthia’s initials engraved on the lid, which Cynthia loved immediately and which seemed to bring out her best feelings towards the girl she’d seemed to harbour suspicions against for so long. “That was nice of her,” she’d said as she made her way to the desk to telephone her and say thank you.

John’s gift was a first edition of James Joyce’s _Finnegan’s Wake_ . On the inside was someone’s carefully handwritten and very old inscription, from a woman named Anna to a man named Wilbert, written in December of the year it was published. _A Christmas gift_ , John thought as he closed the book and vowed to find a place on his shelf for it. He nestled it with the other Joyce novels he did, in fact, possess; which he knew were there because he’d put them there, because he couldn’t pass by a bookstore without checking to see if they had any copies of his work in their inventory, because—once upon a time and forever ago—Julia had found something beautiful in his pages and John, if only for a moment, needed to find it too.

* * *

JOHN: ( _Long pause_ ) She ended seeing Paul so regularly, and me not at all. I’d call her and she wouldn’t be able to talk because she was “entertaining”. That’s what she called it. Whether it was a… client or whatever, or whether it was Paul, I never knew. But I assumed it was, every time. And that’s when I started to hate her.

WILSON: Hate… that’s a strong word.

JOHN: They were strong feelings. ( _Pause_ ) It wasn’t her fault. But I blamed her. I wanted to hurt her the way I was hurting. I took it personally. And it wasn’t just me who knew. We _all_ knew he was going to her place regularly because he bloody well _told_ us he was. But even if he hadn’t, he was so… giddy. So very Paul-like. And I knew it was because of her that he was like that. No one else could have done that.


	32. Such an Easy Game

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: "[Tomorrow's Song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9t3mbv2Hd8)" / "[Yesterday](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCV9oqtwyVA)"

* * *

 MURPHY: So now that your affair was back on and in full swing—

PAUL: Well, for all intents and purposes, you know, yeah... Julia had said we should let things progress naturally, that we couldn’t just pick up where we left off. This is what happened, without forcing anything. Falling back into familiar patterns again. But it wasn’t easy. But was it ever easy? I don't know... ( _Pause_ ) I suppose in that sense it _was_ just like picking up where we’d left off…

* * *

29 January 1965

Weymouth Mews

Paul let his eyes close for a moment. Damp hair stuck to his forehead as he concentrated on finding that sleepy feeling. But he was too keyed up: the sun was still two hours from rising, but despite having not slept much at all, he was wide-awake, sprawled in a wooden deck chair on the rooftop patio of the mews house, ensconced in the cool dark of the London winter night.

Julia, he knew, was showering beneath his feet, washing their early morning lovemaking from her hair and skin as he had done only moments before. He closed his eyes and hunkered down beneath the blanket he'd taken with him as he'd ascended the stairs to her rooftop moments earlier; he remembered what had led him there. Only a half hour before, Julia had been startled awake quite suddenly, letting out a cry so anguished as she sat bolt upright in bed that Paul’s first fear was that there was an intruder in the room with them. But when he awoke and pulled her back to him, heard her crying his name against his chest, tenderness swelled within him and rather than seeking the soft folds of slumber again, he found himself whispering his lips across her skin, her forehead and eyelids, and she rose beneath his touch, and soon he was kneeing her thighs apart, kissing her throat, guiding her hips to him…

It had taken them a while—weeks, in fact—to find their stride. Paul had almost entirely given up hope that he and Julia would ever be able to get there, tangled in bedsheets or waking up next to each other with the blush of ravishment on their skin. He tried, but she resisted, day after day; he’d finally taken to spending the nights with her whenever she would let him, curled up in her bed, reading books or playing Monopoly, with his sexual urges kept in check by the decided way in which she rejected him each time, to the point that he’d stopped trying. Just as it had been in Liverpool four years earlier. But he knew they’d come around; in the end, he was right.

He inhaled her off the blanket as he heard the water shut off somewhere in the distance below his toes. He could almost picture it—Julia, towel-drying her hair, smoothing lotion on her legs, wrapped in her warmest bathrobe, ascending the same wrought iron spiral stairs that led up to the door and out onto the rooftop. When he heard the latch on the door behind him, he almost wondered if he was dreaming it. But when he turned to look at the sound, there she was, wet hair curling over her shoulders and dripping to the worn planks beneath her slippered feet. She smiled and tiptoed to his side.

"Thought I'd find you up here," she said.

He leaned his head back against the deck chair. "Here I be."

She clucked her tongue. "Never knew you to be someone who needed a place to hide away from anything, and yet 'here you be', every time..."

Paul scanned her face, looking for accusation; part of him felt as though it was there, lurking behind her words. But she smiled at him and he accepted it for what it was, turning away to the rooftop terrace. She was right, after all. This place had quickly become one of his favourite places in the whole world. One of the few places left where he truly felt safe, happy; where he could be himself.  _Down there_ , he thought, casting his mind over the edge of the building, _I'm Paul McCartney_ _, famous Beatle, a public possession. Up here, I can be just Paul_.

He sighed.  _Do I need a place to hide away?_ Before the question had had a chance to percolate, Paul felt a tingle in his spine. He liked the way the phrase sounded, the way it filled him up: 'Do I need a place to hide away?' He set his jaw and committed it to memory, confident that he'd be able to use it sometime. 

"Make room?" Julia asked, breaking his concentration. Without warning, she sank down into his lap, and Paul maneuvered the blanket so she could have space beneath it. He pulled it around them both and held her fast against him in the unseasonably warm January morning.

“You’ll catch a cold with all that wet hair, up here in the middle of winter,” he admonished her with a gentle smile.

She just snuggled closer. “Then you’ll get to play doctor,” she whispered, punctuating the end of the sentence with a kiss, pressed to the underside of his jaw, against the stubble on his chin.

Paul sighed. “It’s early.” He checked his watch. “You hungry? Potatoes are my speciality, provided you like them mashed. But if it’s breakfast you’re after—”

“I’m okay,” she kissed his chin again. “But give me an hour or two and then we’ll see.”

 _An hour or two_ , he thought. He knew full well they didn't have an hour or two. London was rising; morning was on their doorstep...

As if sensing his sadness, Julia giggled and kissed his nose. “Did you enjoy that back there?”

"Back there?" he asked.

"You know," she began. "This morning. Us. Back there."

The full brunt of her meaning hit him, and he smiled. Snuggling her closer, he buried his nose in her hair.

“Oh Julia. Imagine,” he said finally, pulling away, “how long did we go on without _this_?”

“If yer talkin’ about back in Liverpool, Paul… things were different then.”

“Yeah, I know,” he muttered, drawing her still closer to him. She rested her head against his shoulder, her hand on his chest, a position Paul could stay in forever if she’d let him, which she didn’t, as she lifted her head then and smiled, threading her fingers through his hair and tracing the contours of his ear.

He tried to watch her, studying her moves; he was still learning the ways of her body, her quirks, the signs and symbols written in her face and on her skin. He knew where she liked to be kissed and the fine line between tickles and arousal. He knew how to move to get her to move with him. He knew what she liked—to be kissed at the base of her throat; the exact way to thread his fingers within her; for her wrists to be held above her head when she came…

He knew her scars, too—the oblong patch on one knee from falling off her bike as a child, and the one on the other from that night on Mather Avenue; three tiny marks on her ankle from where she nicked herself shaving her legs for the first time; that long, jagged line along her jaw that you could only see when she looked up, away from him. Each silvery-white line that marred her porcelain skin was etched into his memory; he was learning the rest of her day by day.

Curled up like this, Paul and Julia watched as the sun lightened the sky above the houses, turning it from black to the deepest indigo, warming up slowly, minute-by-minute until it coloured the sky in broad streaks of cool, pale yellows and grey-tinted oranges. Mornings with Julia were always bittersweet. Nothing made him happier than waking up beside her, but the sunshine rarely banished all the darkness; the nights were all theirs, only theirs, but her days didn’t belong to him any more than his belonged to her.

“What were you dreamin’ about?” he asked her softly. “Downstairs before?”

“Oh you know,” she said, her voice thin and wavering. “Nightmare stuff.”

He pressed his lips into her hair. “You were talking to yerself,” he muttered.

“What was I saying?” she asked, stiffening in his arms.

Paul detected more than a fair sprinkling of fear around the edges of her words. “I think you were running from something,” he said. “You thought someone was chasing you.”

Julia faked a laugh. “Huh, is that so?” she shook her head. “Can’t say it rings any bells…”

Paul was hurt that she felt the need to lie; after so much intimacy, so much effort on his part to get her to trust him, she was still putting up walls that he wasn’t strong enough to tear down. He sighed, feeling the empty hollow in his chest resonate with the sound. “You know I’m leaving on Thursday, right?”

“For Tunisia,” she whispered, kissing his jaw again, rubbing her nose against his day old beard. “Yes, I know.”

“I mean, well this might be the last time for—we’re set to start filming for the new movie, and we’ll be busy,” he sighed. “Jane said we needed holiday and—”

“I know,” she smiled. “You don’t have to justify it. I’m a big girl, Paul, I promise.”

“You’re okay with it?”

She was silent for a moment. “Well, no,” she whispered finally. “Of course I’m not okay with it. But it is what it is.”

In spite of it all, Paul wished he could do better by her; he wanted to give her more than what he was giving her now, more than nights together in her bedroom, huddled under blankets, away from the windows. Julia deserved to be more than someone’s mistress. But if he left Jane—

His mind flashed to the box in his sock drawer, a month forgotten. It wasn’t possible, and yet he couldn’t simply get rid of it...

Julia pushed herself up. “I’m cold. Want some tea?”

He nodded. He knew people would be showing up to their offices and those window-eyes across the road in every direction would come alive before they knew it. As much as he hated to leave, he knew it was nearing his time to go. Standing to his full height, he bundled up the blanket and followed Julia through the hatch and down the stairs into the butterscotch warmth of her bedroom. She shouldered her housecoat off, letting it fall in a pool to the floor as she retrieved a shirt—his shirt—from the bed and slipped her arms into the sleeves before standing up and padding to the turntable she’d set up in the corner for moments like this. In the early morning half-light, it was impossible to see what she was doing. But he heard the scratch and pops of the record needle in the grooves, and then the sound of John singing, “ _This happened once before…_.”

Paul groaned, “Aw, Julia surely you’ve got something else to listen to.”

She glanced over her shoulder. “You don’t like your own recordings?”

“I just… I don’t want to think about being a Beatle right now.”

She turned around again. “Sorry mate. My house, my record player, my rules,” and there it was again, the giggle, which melted Paul’s steely resolve. He would let the matter drop. “Besides,” she continued, “It’s a fine recording.”

“It’s not, y’know,” Paul replied. “It’s filler. Contractual filler.”

She turned the album sleeve over in her hands. Paul squinted to make out her shadowy form on the other side of the room; she perched on the edge of a overturned milk crate that acted as a chair, her long legs— _She should have been a dancer_ , Paul mused; he remembered her on a bridge over the Seine, once upon a midnight so many years ago, dancing and swaying and leaping onto the parapet...—her legs crossed at the knee, foot bouncing in the air in time with the beat. “There _are_ a lot of old Cavern songs on this one.”

Paul sneered defensively. “Well we couldn’t exactly write fourteen brand-new songs now, could we? What with touring and interviews and traveling and—”

"You misunderstood me," she grinned and shook her head. “I _like_ your Cavern songs.”

“Yeah, well,” he replied as he smoothed out a wrinkle in the duvet, and brushed off a dusty cloud of plaster dust along with it. “Hey, when’re yeh gonna finish these renovations?”

She looked stung as she cast a glance in his direction. He hadn’t meant it to hurt, and he sighed.

“I’m workin’ on it, all right?” she shrugged and set the sleeve back on top of her other records. “I didn’t know it bothered you.”

“It doesn’t,” he replied. “What’s the problem?”

“It’s nothing,” her voice was sweet, honey-dipped. He knew her well enough to know she was avoiding the rough stuff.

“Come on.”

“No, it’s fine. Nothing I want you to worry about.”

“Is it money?” Paul asked, suddenly sure of himself. “I could loan you—”

Julia’s gaze sharpened at him. For a long moment, neither of them said a word. Finally, she closed her eyes and, determined, bent to grab her leggings from the floor. After jumping and wiggling to get them pulled on all the way, she swept her long hair off her back and up into an elastic she’d had circling her wrist.

“I can handle it, Paul,” she said finally, not looking at him as she spoke; rather, she began tidying up what little mess surrounded them. The second song of John’s _Beatles for Sale_ opening trilogy was playing. Paul sat up against the pillows and followed Julia around the room with his eyes.

“So it is about money then.”

“Paul, leave it.” She tossed a pair of socks into the laundry.

He heard the words but he heard the tone, too. She didn’t want him to leave it, not simply, not like that. She sighed, leaning against the record bench, still muttering nonsense under her breath.

“What’s that, love?”

She straightened. “I’m a little... _behind_ , that’s all.”

“How far behind is ‘a little’?”

She shrugged. “They haven’t sent around the collections people yet, so,” she managed a small smile. “All told, it’s probably a lot. I guess I’m one of those proverbial egg counters. Always counting chickens before they’ve hatched.”

He didn’t even think twice. “I mean it. I’ll loan you what you need to get it finished.”

Julia cocked her head to the side. “Right, just leave it on the bedstead before you go, is that it?” she asked.

Paul shook his head. “No—”

“I don’t want yer fuckin’ money.”

Confused, Paul tried again. “But I thought you were workin’ and things were going well—”

“Well they were before _you_ started comin’ ‘round every bloody night!”

Julia spun around and lifted the arm of the record player before retreating down the stairs to the second floor and then down to the ground level, to the kitchen, where he heard her running water and starting the kettle going. Dumbstruck, he sat on the edge of the bed, questions burning against the roof of his mouth. He had no idea what to make of the outburst.

“Julia, what do you mean by that?” he asked her shadow.

Seconds later, her footsteps sounded up the stairs; different, lighter, prancing and joyful. The change in her was startling. She was carrying Paul’s acoustic guitar with her.

She set the guitar down on the bed and threw her arms around his shoulders. “Play your song again, will you?”

He furrowed his brow. “I’m confused—”

“Just play, Paul,” she said. “I don’t want to talk anymore. I want to hear your song.”

He’d brought his guitar over the night before to play his little song for her, the one he'd been playing for weeks, the one for which he hadn’t yet found the words. The melody though was mostly there, only waiting to be felt out by his fingertips, uncovered on the piano keyboard or his guitar strings. Paul was immensely proud of what he’d accomplished, but it wasn’t anywhere near finished and he was nervous about playing it; the night before, punch drunk and full of love, he’d serenaded her as they sat on the quilted duvet, and now he felt slightly embarrassed that she’d heard what was nothing more than an unfinished and unpolished half-piece, a song without words.

His anger dissipated as he thought about how she’d reacted the night before when he first played it for her; he wanted to recapture that, certainly. And Paul was angry that he knew he was going to give in to her; he would drop the issue between them, whatever it was, and he'd play the damn song. Because as she looked at him and smiled, he felt as if he’d broken off a piece of the early morning sunshine, swallowed it whole, and now radiated sparks from within his chest. They blazed and fanned higher with each breath he took; the light seemed to shoot out of his fingertips and the ends of his toes. And all because she smiled at him. He would have done anything to make her smile like that again, and again, and again. It was impossible to resist.

“All right…,” he whispered, fingering the frets and strumming a little to make sure the strings were still in tune. She chirped and snuggled down, folding her legs in front of her and burying her hands beneath her feet. This could hardly be the same woman who had less than an hour before wrapped her long dancer’s legs around his waist to urge him forward to the very height of orgasmic bliss, crying his name and begging him to take her in ways he had never dreamed he’d ever get to take any woman the likes of Julia…

And yet it was. It was a contradiction he couldn’t reconcile.

Just like her.

Feeling his face blush, he cleared his throat. “You ready for this?”

She nodded enthusiastically. _You can’t get out of this one, McCartney._

So he flexed his fingers, strummed through a false start, acutely aware of her eyes watching his every move, and quietly, he began to sing. “ _Scrambled eggs…_ .”

* * *

PAUL: Everyone is manipulative. We’re each our own PR people, y’know. The moment we wake up and decide what to wear, we’re projecting an image. And it’s not always the truth about who we are. Put your best foot forward, right? Use what you’ve got to get what you want. ( _Pause_ ) I thought I was good at that, at giving people what _they_ wanted in order to get what _I_ wanted. But Julia—she was a master. She ran circles around me, around all of us. Looking back, she was always ten steps ahead, anticipating what I’d want next and positioning herself to be the only person who could deliver it. And she always did. ( _Pause_ ) I don’t know how she had the energy to do it. With one boyfriend it would have been a full time job. She had me, and John—though I didn’t know it at the time—and then there were the others.

MURPHY: The others?

PAUL: Come on, mate… you’re not as simple as I was, are you? ( _pause; an indistinct sound, shuffling papers_ ) She didn’t have boyfriends. She had clients. And she didn’t have very many of them. I was there every night I could be, and John was there just as often when I wasn’t. She was always at the mews house because she had to be, because we asked her to be. So she wasn’t working, wasn’t bringing in any money. ( _Pause_ ) I just didn’t see it…

MURPHY: Didn’t see it or didn’t _want_ to see it?

PAUL: ( _Pause_ ) Now _that’s_ a good question… because there were a lot of things that I didn’t want to see back then.


	33. Achtung, Baby

* * *

 Chapter Soundtrack: "[Seven Corners](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmOMILtl2IM)" / "[I Should Have Known Better](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5en2JMLA8Z0)"

* * *

JOHN: I’m not proud of the way I conducted myself. I didn’t know how else to get her attention. I never really did, not with her. Not with _anyone_. But I was an absolute shitheel, I know that much.

WILSON: What did you do?

JOHN: When we were in the Bahamas filming _Help!_ I wrote her a fucking postcard every day. Every single day for two weeks. I wasn’t even talking to Cyn that often. ( _Pause_ ) Julia didn’t like that very much.

WILSON: I don’t understand…

JOHN: I had her address, her telephone number, I knew her schedule, but I was all over the place, writing her letters or contacting her however and whenever it suited me. Postcards showing up in the mail from someone she clearly didn’t want around. That’s a bit controlling, don’t you think? But that was the mindset. And I suppose Paul was no different. He’d call around and tell her “I’ll be there in an hour,” and expect her to open the door for him. And every bloody time, she would.

WILSON: It sounds like she was a willing participant, doesn’t it?

JOHN: That’s what I thought at the time, too. But what would we have done if she’d put her foot down and said no? What if she’d stood up for herself? Did she really have a choice? ( _Pause_ ) After the Bahamas, we flew home and had a couple of days off before flying to Austria to continue filming. I was jet lagged and grouchy—we’d just worked two weeks straight. I was knackered. And you know how you are when you’re dead tired. You just react to things, your base needs kicking in. Pure Id. So I telephoned her, and I demanded to see her and told her that I was going to arrange a flight for her and that she was going to meet us in Austria and that would be that. She was to fly in the night before we wrapped the shoot. But when she arrived…

* * *

19 March 1965  
Hotel Edelweiss  
Obertauern, Austria 

Hers was just another pretty face in a crowd of pretty faces gathered in the _après-ski_ lounge; none of the Austrian extras or staff at the hotel, nor any of the English crew, had any idea who she was, and she made little effort to talk to anyone all night, occasionally smiling as she sipped mulled wine by the large fire in the centre of the room, looking lost and morose at the very centre of the _Help!_ wrap party for the Austrian shoot.

John had seen to that. He knew the sadness in her eyes had been put there by him, by his words and his actions. The slope of her shoulders, the pain on her face: it was all his handiwork.

Standing alone on the balcony overlooking the snow-capped Alps, dark shapes standing against a blue-black sky dotted with more stars than John had ever seen in his life, he wondered why he’d bothered bringing her here. But of course he knew. Back there inside the chalet, Paul was obviously overjoyed, believing that John had set it up as a surprise for him, a misapprehension that John had done nothing to dispel the previous evening when Julia had walked into the lobby of the hotel as they were returning from filming on the ski hills surrounding the hamlet. She’d seen John first, her smile broad and open, and he’d—briefly, oh-so-briefly—returned it, elated, filled with longing and affection that he hadn’t felt since Christmas, since the last time they’d been together. He forgot where he was, who he was with; all the anger and frustration over their lack of communication melted away like the snow on her boots.

But Paul—ever the puppy dog, wagging his tail—had stepped forward and embraced her first, and that was that. Before he’d even had a chance to say hello, Julia was gone from him.

In his anger at being upstaged, John had stepped forward then and clapped a hand on Julia’s shoulder and with feigned enthusiasm said: “ _Had her shipped in, overnight express. Just fer you, Macca._ ”

With his bare hands, John pushed palmfuls of snow off the railing in front of him, letting his fingers rest against the icy surface, ignoring the aching, cold burn in his skin, believing he deserved it. 

 _Fuckin' bastard_ , he thought to himself.  _That's what you are, and nothing more..._

“That’s how you get frostbite, you know.”

John half-turned to see George stepping out onto the patio. He clutched at his arms, folded tightly across his chest. George let out a breath.

“Christ, just _standing_ here is how you get frostbite...”

“It’s cold,” John said.

“Oh right. Hadn’t noticed.”

George joined him at the railing, leaning over with his elbows on the wood beside him. John mimicked his pose. Melted snow pricked the skin on his hands. He laced his fingers together to conserve warmth.

“Home in a few days?” George asked.

“That’s right.”

“A few days rest in between?”

John nodded.

George turned to look at him. “What did you think was going to happen, John?”

John looked down over the edge of the balcony, to the soft snow drifts down below. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I honestly hadn’t gotten that far.”

George didn’t say anything. For a long moment, the two of them stood in the eerie alpen silence; it was interrupted at last by the sound of the door opening again, and this time Paul and Ringo stepped out to join them. The brisk, frigid air made them yelp and squeal at first, but as they trudged over to join George and John at the very edge of the balcony, the only sounds they made were from their shoes crunching over the thin layer of snow on the planks beneath their feet.

“What are you two doin’ out here?” Paul asked.

“Baking scones,” George said.

Ringo laughed. Out of the corner of his eye, John saw him flick a lighter. “Enough to go around,” Ringo said as he passed the joint to Paul, who took a long drag.

“I think we should play something," Paul said. "For the crowd inside, you know."

“Just as long as it’s not that bloody song of yours, Paul,” George said.

John laughed. Paul handed him the joint.

“Someone’s already brought down the guitars,” he said, nudging John with his elbow. “Where’s your harmonica?”

John held his breath, his lungs full of smoke, for a long moment before blowing a steady stream out from his mouth. He patted his breast pocket and cast his eyes heavenward. “Eh there you go, Mum! This is precisely why you taught me how to play,” he joked. “So I could entertain guests with ‘Home on the Range’ at fancy dinner parties attended by the littering gloominaries of Hitler's former Gestapo.”

“If you don’t want to play, John, just say so,” Paul replied. “I’m sure we could all find other ways to pass the time.”

 _I bet you could_ , he thought to himself, his mind’s eye on Julia. “No, it’s fine,” he said, passing the joint on. “What else are The Beatles gonna do in the frozen tundra of Österreich?”

It hit him—as it did every once in a while, randomly, on airplanes or onstage or in the midst of throngs of screaming fans—that maybe this was the pinnacle of what they’d achieve. Squished in against a wooden railing, shoulder to shoulder with his brothers, surrounded by snow, gazing out over the skiers still shushing along down below in the floodlit expanse of trails, he searched for the feeling he thought he should have. Just like every other time, he came up empty.

It wasn’t so late that the skiers on the slopes weren’t still carving their way through the freshly fallen powder beyond the deck. Paul was the one who started shouting down at them—a random assortment of German phrases, some of which were contextually appropriate but most of which weren't and before long all four Beatles were shouting to the darkness and attracting attention of the people still out in the snow.

“ _Achtung!_ ”

“ _Schneemann!_ ”

“ _Ich mag Skifahren_!”

“ _Vorsicht!”_

 _“Hilfe!_ ”

“ _Mach schnee! Mach schnee!_ ”

The four of them collapsed against the railing in a fit of giggles as a crowd of skiers ogled them from below. They laughed until their lungs hurt, until their bellies ached, until John had almost forgotten what had prompted him to step out into the cold in the first place. He inhaled sharply past the stitch in his side and exhaled a raincloud. It was as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

“How did we get here?” John asked no one in particular.

“Practice,” Ringo replied.

“British Airways,” George said at the same time.

Paul tittered, already high as a kite. John found that amusing; Paul when he was high was a riot. John smiled, fully letting go of his irritation for a moment. He missed his friend fiercely.

“No, I mean it,” John said. “It feels like just yesterday that we were in Mona Best’s cellar and now…” he looked around him as the fog of his depression settled once again over him.

Beside him, Paul nudged his shoulder. “Where are we goin’, Johnny?”

John looked down at his hands, cold and red against the bannister. “To the top,” he said.

“And where’s that?”

John looked at Paul and winked. “Gamskarlspitze Mountain, I think,” he replied.

“Top of the world,” Paul smiled, genuinely and broadly, and for a moment John allowed himself the space to think it was going to be okay.

“Let’s go back inside,” Ringo suggested. “I can’t feel my hands.”

“I hope you can drum with your feet then,” George offered as the two made their way back towards the door, leaving John alone again at the railing.

Paul, however, stopped half way and turned back. “You comin’?”

John turned to look at him. “This is what we wanted, right?” he asked. “This is what we’ve been working for?”

Paul nodded. “I suppose so. Isn’t it?”

From inside the party, a loud cheer went up; through the glass, John could see Ringo raising his drum sticks at the far end of the room, where an impromptu stage had been set up. John pushed himself off the railing.

“I’m so tired.”

“We all are,” was Paul’s reply, blunted by the distance between them and the cold but somehow still sharp enough to pierce.

It was the first time in a long time that John had heard anything close to pessimism come out of his best friend’s mouth. Surprise didn't quite cut it. _If Paul’s worn down,_ he thought, _what chance do I have?_

They walked into the room, putting on their performance smiles as they ringed the crowd.

“What should we play first?” Paul asked as they made their way to the far end of the room.

John looked out over the throng, zeroing in on her face. Her face, framed by her long hair, made-up pale, the very picture of mod perfection. She looked to be the saddest person in the room. When their eyes locked, she held his gaze for a split second before turning away once again.

He adjusted the strap on his shoulder and pulled his harmonica out of his pocket. “I Should Have Known Better,” he said, gripping the harmonica in his hand, warming the chill in the metal before bringing it up to his lips.


	34. Your Todays and His Tomorrows

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is one of my favourite chapters that I've written for this story. I hope you enjoy it too...

* * *

 Chapter Soundtrack: "[Nightfall](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9WFWaZTp6o)" / "[Alpine Sketch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scoh9kmpmQ0)" / "[Painting the Horizon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl_kBvugED4)"

* * *

 20 March 1965  
Hotel Edelweiss  
Very early morning…

“You don’t like me?” the busty _fraulein_ moped, settling back on the bed, her knees tucked beneath her.

John furrowed his brow and scrubbed a hand across his tired face. “It’s not you,” he muttered to the ceiling; he wasn’t even sure if the girl heard him. But he couldn’t have cared less; he didn’t even know her name.

This girl, whose basic grasp of English didn’t afford her the benefit of comprehending John’s muted upward utterance, purred and inched forward once again, descending on John’s cock. But John knew that all the machinations in the world were not going to help. He was a bit too drunk, a bit too tired, and far too focused on the brunette he’d brought here to notice or care about the blonde in front of him, the one with her lips wrapped around his semi-flaccid member, trying to coax it to life.

He closed his eyes and tried, but all he could think about was _Where is Julia now? Is she still down in the lounge? Or did she finally go to bed with Paul? Is she sleeping? Or is she riding out a climax you’re not giving her?_

A surge of hot anger bubbled up within him, replacing the sad frustration of the moment, and as the acrid smoke of that particular fire obscured all thoughts of Julia, John sat up and pushed the woman off the bed.

“Get the fuck out!”

Startled, she scrambled to her feet and collected her clothes—a discarded sweater, a pair of leggings—and hustled to the door, with John a rampaging bull at her heels. He kicked her shoes out of the way, shouting at her the entire time. And even though she hurled open the door, eager as she was to remove herself from the path of John’s irrational anger, once she was on the other side she let expletives soar, broken English and idiosyncratic Austrian phrases that John thought he didn’t understand but which, he later realized, he just couldn’t hear because of the angry blood throbbing in his ears.   

John pressed his hands to the inside of the closed hotel room door and breathed, deep belly breaths intended to quell his rage but which hurt more as they ripped from his lungs. He gulped and gasped, heavy guttural heaves vocalized on each exhale; he could only hope that no one on the other side of the door could hear him. When the woman’s angry protestations eventually died down, and he heard her stomp away, John realized his hands were shaking, his arms were shaking, his knees were shaking. He was ashamed to admit that his face was wet with tears.

Sinking to the floor, as much out of need to relieve his quaking limbs as anything, John slowly leaned back against the closed door and drew his legs up to his chest. He couldn’t be sure how many minutes passed, but eventually his breathing evened out, and his hands stopped shaking, and he felt the pall of fatigue take over residence, wresting control from the hands of his stark emotionality. He swiped a hand across his face and pushed himself up to his feet.

He heard them coming down the hallway; soft voices, muted initially, but growing more clear and distinct as they neared. And he knew, without a doubt, who they belonged to, long before he had the presence of mind to put his eye to the peephole in the door; his morbid and masochistic curiosity winning out, like it almost always did.

“I’m just so tired, Paul.”

“So let’s put you to bed…”

“Don’t you think it’s best if I went to my own room tonight?”

“Don’t you _want_ to stay here?”

“It’s not that…”

John peered through the door, watching the fish-eye distorted scene playing out in front of him. His heart beat wildly at the base of his throat.

“What if someone sees?”

“I don’t want to fight with you, Julia. There are a dozen birds downstairs I could have asked up here.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

“Because I asked _you_.”

John looked away, distancing himself from their conversation. He didn’t want to see what transpired but he also didn’t need to see it to know what would happen. Because this was a story to which the ending had already been written; it had been written and rewritten over and over again, in hotels around the world, with this negotiation always being conducted and always being successfully defended by the dark-haired man with one hand on the doorknob and the other in the small of her back.

John leaned his head against the door and began to count.

At the count of seven, he heard the door across the hall shut and the voices disappeared.

John held his breath and continued. _Eight…nine…_

_…ten._

He sighed and closed his eyes, pushing past his disappointment to chase the exhaustion that was now a permanent resident in his bones. He stepped away from the door and began the slow trudge across the room to the bed, rubbing his eyes as he crawled into bed and found fitful slumber.

* * *

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been asleep when he heard the knock at the door. At first it was so faint that he wasn’t sure it was real, but as he willed himself to tumble back toward sleep, he heard it again, louder and more insistent this time, and realised it wasn’t a dream at all. So he pushed himself up, swinging his legs one by one over the edge of the bed until his feet touched the carpet, flexing his toes, groaning.

“All right,” he grumbled, his voice croaked and faint. He coughed and stood up, walking the distance from his bed to the door in small, half-sleeping steps. He didn’t even check to see who it was; he simply flipped the latch, turned the knob, and swung the door open.

“Oh,” Julia said, surprised. “I woke you.” She was leaning against the doorframe, obviously drunk.

He looked over her shoulder at the door across the hall. “Where’s Paul?” His palms began to sweat.

“Sulkin’,” she said. “I don’t know…”

John snorted; inside, his heart surged. “Why?” he asked. “Lovers’ quarrel?”

Julia pushed her fringe out of her eyes, sighing in exasperation. “Can I come in?”

He opened the door and Julia stepped inside, letting the door shut behind her.

In the pitched half-light, from John’s sleepy and un-spectacled eyes, it was hard to make out details. But he could see the way Julia teetered as she took one step, then another, into the room. When she lowered herself to the ground, John wondered if she was going to pass out right there in the small foyer.

Instead, she lifted herself to her feet, and lifted her face to his. “Who was she?” she asked.

John looked down and noticed she was holding one of the shoes belonging to the woman he had kicked out however-many-hours before. He shrugged. “Judy Garland,” he said. “You just missed her.”

Julia tossed the shoe to the carpet. “Yer a fuckin’ bastard, Lennon.”

“Can’t I wake up first before we start stroppin’?”

“Why did you ask me to come here?”

“Why did you agree to come?”

“I—” she started before trailing off. “A man showed up at my door with a plane ticket and travel itinerary. Did I have a fucking choice?”

John shrugged.

Julia sighed and collapsed back against the wall. “John—“ she whispered “You sent me a dozen postcards.”

He nodded. “Yes, I did.”

“Don’t do that.”

John shrugged. “Why not?”

“Anyone could have read those. At the post office. The mail carrier. Didn’t you think of that?”

“Yes mum,” he replied, even though he hadn’t considered that at all.

Another sigh, hitched at the end with a sob. “Why did you bring me here if you weren’t even going to _talk_ to me?”

John sat on the end of the bed and yawned. “I didn’t think you _wanted_ to talk to me.”

“I don’t.”

He slumped his shoulders. “Well then.”

Julia walked, her gait unsteady, to join him on the end of the bed. “I didn’t mean that,” she slurred. “I don’t know what I want. I’m so confused.”

“You’re drunk.”

She nodded. “That too…”

John focused his attention on a patch of carpet, illuminated by a shaft of moonlight outside the hotel. “Why aren’t you with Paul?”

“I didn’t want to be with Paul tonight,” she replied.

“You didn’t?”

She shook her head. “I wanted to be with you.”

John flexed his toes again. “Not like this,” he said.

He felt her fingertips brush against his on the bed. “I know.”

For a while they sat in silence.

“Why _did_ you bring me here, John? Really.”

John sighed. “I honestly don’t know,” he lied, before thinking better of it. “I _did_ want to see you. And I wanted to see you with him.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Because I need to know that this is over between us,” he admitted. “Because I think it is and I need to know, that’s all.”

Julia swayed beside him. “Where did you get that idea?” she whispered, and again, her fingertips on his hand grounded him. “It’s not over.”

John couldn’t allow himself to hope. “You said it yourself. This couldn’t happen again.” John pulled his hand away from hers. “Besides, even if it could, I know you’re seeing him.”

She was deathly silent for a long moment. “It just… happened.”

“Like before Christmas?” he asked. “The way that just _happened_?”

“John…”

“I’m not going to share you with Paul McCartney, Julia.”

“Don’t make me choose, John Lennon.”

The way she spat his name hurt more than the words that preceded it. Wounded, he spat right back. “What does he have that I don’t have? Why _couldn’t_ you choose?”

Again, a long silence followed, punctuated briefly by a gush of water in the radiator pipes, marching steadfastly against the frigid air threatening the plaster walls from outside. Julia sniffled and shifted on the bed. “Paul is… hopeful,” she said finally, her inchmeal words precisely chosen from the sloshing jumble of her drunken mind. “He’s light. He’s happiness.” She sighed. “I think he makes me better? He makes me _want_ to be better, maybe. I don’t know…”

John gripped the quilt on the bed. He didn’t want to hear any more and he absolutely _had_ to hear everything…

“When he talks about the future…” she continued. “It’s a place I want to go. Away from everything that’s happened to me, everything… I want to believe in the promise that he represents. If I’ve had to survive this life this far…”

“Julia—”

“No, let me finish,” she continued, entirely undeterred. “A future with Paul would be easy. It would be entirely certain and uncomplicated. We’d have this big house. We’d have a dozen kids. We’d have dogs and cats. We’d go to the zoo at the weekend,” she said, sighing. “That’s the future Paul will build no matter what, whether he marries me or Jane Asher or the girl he’s probably got sleeping in his bed right now. It wouldn’t matter. It _doesn’t_ matter. His future is so inevitable, there’s no escaping it.” She sighed. “But how could he possibly love me if he knew what I’ve done? All the things in my past?”

For once, John grew defensive of his friend. “I don’t think you give him enough credit, Julia. He’s not a monster.”

“Maybe not,” she whispered.

John waited for what he considered to be a Herculean amount of time before opening his mouth to speak.

“And me?”

“You?”

He turned to her. Seeing her like this, lunar illumination cold splashed across her face, he was reminded of that self-portrait she’d photographed all those years ago, the one she’d shown him on the walls of the Walker. Once again, he felt like a voyeur looking at her in a moment of unguarded thought. But she had been inviting him in all along. Nakedly vulnerable, remarkably lucid—in a way that suggested to him that she’d thought about this so much that the words she wanted to say had been burned on her memory, unforgettable now, even whilst drunk—she’d chosen to unburden herself once more to him. He didn’t know what it meant but he stacked his spine a little bit straighter, sat a little bit taller, in response.

She inhaled. Exhaled. “You make my todays better,” she said softly. “And maybe with enough good todays under my belt, tomorrow won’t be so bad, even if it isn’t clear. That’s what I love about you,” she told him. “A future with you would be different. One that I helped to build. It would be mine just as much as yours.” She shifted on the mattress. “But yer too angry, John. You frighten me. You’re angry and spiteful and jealous and I don’t like bringing out that side of you.”

 _Then don’t_ , he wanted to say. But he didn’t.

Julia turned back to the room and breathed again. “Besides, neither of yeh are mine to choose from anyway. You know that right? It’s never been up to me. And even if I _could_ choose, I couldn’t. Because you’ve got your life and he’s got his. Because there’s no room for me anywhere. Because I want your todays and his tomorrows, and I can’t have both, and I don’t deserve either,” she told him. “But he makes me want to live, and you make me feel _alive_.”

After a pause, she continued. “I need you both, I think, just as much as you both claim to need me.” She trailed off. “But I’m so tired of being needed like this. I don’t understand it at all.”

“You don’t understand being needed?”

She shook her head. “Why me?”

It was a valid question, and one that he had asked himself enough in the long years since she’d first taken up residence in his temporal lobe. And he didn’t have one answer; he had dozens of them. _Did you want to sleep or did you want me to answer your question?_ he thought of asking before simply replying: “Why _not_ you?”

Whether it worked or not, John couldn’t tell. But Julia seemed to soften, giving in. “Can I sleep here?” she asked, in a voice full of desperation and pleading, childlike, exhausted. She sounded the way he felt. “Just sleep.”

John couldn’t deny her. He watched Julia push herself back, kicking off her shoes and scooting up until she was on the bed. She lay on her side, her head on the pillow, her knees tucked against her. He joined her, facing her, and as she closed her eyes, he reached over to brush the hair away from her face.

“I love you, John,” she whispered as she drifted off to sleep. “I love you, I love you… and I wish I had never met you.”

It was the first time she’d told him that; he was too shocked to say it back. By the time his tongue caught up with his brain, she was fast asleep, her breathing deep and even and uninterruptible. In the time it took John to fall back to sleep, he ran through every possible permutation of their current situation, ranking each one, deciding what he could live with and what he simply couldn’t abide.

It quickly became clear to him that, as long as he had even a sliver of a chance to be with her, he’d live with just about any of it.

Even Paul.

For now—forever?—this would have to do.

* * *

JOHN: After all that, I bought the mews house for Julia. From the dentist.

WILSON: ( _Pause_ ) I’m sorry, what?

JOHN: The moment we got back to London. The dentist guy wasn't even selling, but everything—everyone—they have their price. ( _Pause_ ) It was all through middlemen, everything arranged through financial advisors, through Brian—he always liked Julia, and I think he knew a great deal more than he let on about her problems, so he was helpful in getting the papers to her, had her sign everything, arranged the title transfer, because I think he thought in his own way he was helping someone get out of a cycle they couldn’t get out of themselves.

WILSON: Why did you do it? And after what she’d said about not wanting to be in your debt, in anyone’s debt.

JOHN: I’d like to tell you it was out of chivalry. That I didn’t want her working like that anymore, that there was some gallant notion in my head that she would see what I’d done for her and choose me over him. The grand romantic gesture. ( _Pause_ ) Something Paul would’ve done.

WILSON: But—?

JOHN: But I know I was looking for hurt. Looking for pain. It’s what I thought I deserved. So I bought her a house. So domestic, so intimate. It was a surefire way to guarantee that when it all fell apart—as I knew it would—it would hurt like hell…


	35. Cavendish

* * *

 Chapter Soundtrack: [aisatsana [102]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_MRe3JwFc8)

* * *

MURPHY: So much of this part of the story takes place in Weymouth Mews.

PAUL: Well that’s because Julia’s home became kind of like another home for us in London.

MURPHY: How so?  
  
PAUL: Well... George and John and Ring, they were out in Surrey, way out, in these big houses. I was the only one still in London. So, you know, after a long recording session or a night at the clubs, no one wanted to drive back out. We needed places to stay that were central and close, and above all else safe for us to spend time at. And a couple of times we imposed upon the Ashers but that wasn’t going to cut it, not long-term. So in the end we were spending nights at Julia’s more and more often, the whole lot of us, sometimes maybe only two or three of us.

MURPHY: A Beatle bolt hole.

PAUL: Right. And that was wonderful. I mean, there’d be no fans waiting at her door, no people idling their cars hoping for a glimpse… no people _at all_ most of the time. It was incredibly appealing. But it’s not just about having a place that shields you from the eyes of the world for a while, you know. I needed a place that was comfortably _mine_ , and at Julia’s, as much as I loved being there, it couldn’t be that. I wanted it to be me-and-her, you know. But we all shared her home with her. With each other.  We might as well have been on the lease. She could have gotten keys cut. ( _Pause_ ) Maybe that’s why George was so against it, our picking up with Jules again. If we blew it, he’d lose her too. ( _Pause_ ) You know, I never thought of it that way. It was so important that we kept her for ourselves. I think that must have been the case for all of us. ( _Pause_ ) Not very fair to her, I suppose…

MURPHY: ( _Pause)_ So... you start looking at real estate?

PAUL: Mm-hmm. ( _Pause_ ) You know, it was strange. Julia and I, we never saw each other in the daytime. Only at night. ( _Pause_ ) She had the most beautiful hair, have I mentioned that yet? Seeing it in the sunlight really drove the point home for me, because it was so _verboten_ , almost. It’s little things like that that made me start to imagine a future with her again. I wanted to be free to see her in the sunlight all the time… so I bought her a house…

* * *

13 April 1965  
St. John’s Wood, London 

“Just hold the clipboard,” Paul instructed. He reached over across the gear shift in the front seat of Julia’s idling Citroën and adjusted the clipboard in Julia’s hand. Then he looked up at her face, studying the glasses she wore low on her nose. “And these glasses—” He reached a hand up and lifted the frames, repositioning them higher up and closer to her brow.

Julia laughed in spite of herself as Paul began to smooth flyaway hairs from the severe chignon style he’d made her wear; hairs dislodged by his own machinations with the glasses moments before. “Paul, stop. You’re being ridiculous.”

But Paul was deadly serious. “You need to look the part!” he protested, leaning back in his seat to take her in. “Today, you’re my lawyer.”

Julie quirked an eyebrow. “So I get to advise you? Tell you what to do?”

Paul smiled. “For today.”

“ _Only_ today?” she mock-scowled. “Yer no fun anymore.”

Paul peered out the rain-slicked windows of his car, parked on the quiet residential street two blocks away from the property he’d only just purchased that afternoon. The streets were empty, on account of the miserable weather and the fact that it was a Tuesday and they were far enough away from the hustle and bustle of the commercial districts of Central London to avoid the crowds of business people and tourists. Emboldened by the solitude, he leaned over again, reaching his hand along her jaw and burying his fingers in her hair before pulling her in for a kiss.

Julia smiled against him—he could feel it in her lips—but her hands on his chest gently pushing him away were ice cold. “You’ll muss me,” she said as she broke away. “Show me this house.”

Paul leaned back into his seat and put the car in drive.

Within a minute, they were pulling onto his street, creeping along past the stone gates that lined either side. As the car came to a stop, Paul pointed to his right.

“Number seven Cavendish,” he told her as leaned over to look out the window. The Regency townhouse loomed beyond the driveway, partially shaded by the large trees that overhung the property.

“It’s yours?”

Paul nodded. “ _This_ is my house.” The words, said out loud for the first time, hit him square in the chest, and he smiled. “Yeah, it’s _my_ house.”

Julia grinned. “Not bad for a skinny kid from the Allerton council estate, eh?”

Chuffed, Paul shrugged his shoulders. “I can give you a round-the-outside tour,” he said. “Don’t have the keys yet for inside.”

“Lovely,” Julia replied.

Paul pulled the Citroën into the driveway, parking it out of sight of the street just in case, and keyed off the engine. They both stepped out into the light rain; drops sizzled in the leaves overhead. He pulled an umbrella out from the backseat and shut the door; Julia clutched her clipboard and adjusted her glasses, glancing across the top of the car in his direction.

Paul smiled at her as he rounded the back of the car and reached her side. “It needs a bit of work,” he said, motioning to the wide-open driveway. “For security, you know. A gate. Intercom…”

Julia nodded. “Bloodhounds, electrified barbed wire, sniper towers…” she winked.

Paul grinned and tugged his jacket closed as he started to walk around to the front of the house, Julia close beside him, sheltered beneath the umbrella.

“How many rooms?”

“Don’t know. Don’t remember,” Paul admitted. “A lot. I want to make one into a music room, maybe. A recording studio’d be nice.” He paused and looked at her. “Lots of bedrooms for… you know… guests and such.” A pause. “For kids.” He swallowed. “Big, proper master bedroom, too.”

“That so?”

“Well, there will be.”

She nodded. A car slowing down outside the gate gave Paul pause; Julia, ever observant, adjusted the glasses on her nose and looked down at her clipboard. _Playing the part_.

“You’re close to the studio too?”

He nodded. “Could walk if I wanted.”

“You won’t though,” she said, turning to eye the car, in which the passengers—while still idling on the road—sat poring over a map, clearly not interested in the goings on just beyond the gate. “You know the girls’ll track you down. You’ll be walking to and from work with a gaggle of female fans pawin’ at yeh, rippin’ yer clothes off.” She looked back and winked at him. “Unless that was all part of your fiendish little plan.”

Paul laughed. “Being attacked by eager and willing fans,” he rolled his eyes in mock delight. “The stuff of dreams.”

Julia threw her head back and laughed. With her face tilted toward the weak sunlight filtering down through the clouds, tiny splashes of rainwater dampening her skin, she looked almost angelic. Radiant. Paul ached.

“There’s a big garden round back,” he said. “Come ‘ead.”

Together they walked down and around the far side of the house, stopping every few steps to examine this windowsill, that area of brickwork. In the relative security of the sheltered back garden, where the sounds of London became the sounds of nature, Paul finally breathed.

“It’s a little overgrown,” he said. “Maybe it could be built up though. Put something fantastic back here. A guest house maybe. Some play furniture. Gardens for the littles to muck around in.” He looked askance at her. “What do you think?”

Julia scanned the lot from right to left and then back again. “You could do a whole Petit Versailles back here,” she said, her voice reverent beneath the canopy of trees under which she stood. “A hideaway of your very own.”

Paul looked around him and nodded; he liked the idea immensely. “Follies everywhere,” he said. “Ruins and pathways. Little secret places.”

Julia pointed to a spot along the property line. “A thatched roof house, a little fairytale cottage for the girls.”

“Maybe a garden swing,” Paul said, joining in as he pointed a little ways further. “With a pond full of fish.”

“And ducks.”

“Naturally.”

She smiled and closed her eyes. “It’s so peaceful back here,” she said. “Sounds like you’ve got a plan for everything, Mr. McCartney.”

Paul figured he did. It had never seemed so secure and attainable as it did right then. So he nodded. “Yeah, I think I do.”

Julia was walking ahead of him, sheltered from the drizzle by more overhanging tree branches. “You’ve always wanted kids, eh?”

“I ‘spose so, yeah,” he said. “You?”

Julia turned around to face him. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I can’t imagine more than a few hours ahead of where I am right now. Minute-by-minute, that’s how I advance through the world.”

She studied him. In her off-white turtleneck and brown suede skirt, her hair pinned back and the glasses on her nose, she looked older than she was. It was, ironically, as if he were looking at her ten or twenty years down the road. So when she asked the question sitting on her tongue, it was nothing for him to answer her.

“Tell me, Paul,” she said then. “When you picture this idyllic family life of yours—”

“You,” he said.

Julia looked up at him. “Hm?”

“I see _you_ ,” he pointed at the flagstone patio just off the back door. “In an armchair, sitting there with a book in your lap…” he smiled at her. “In the kitchen, drinking coffee in the morning, afternoon tea. I see you in the children’s bedrooms, singing our daughter to sleep. I see you and me. I see us.”

Julia actually began to laugh, once again throwing her head back; hand on her hips, she stared up at the sky for a long moment. “Of course… of fucking course,” she muttered. “And I suppose if Jane were here—”

“No, Julia,” he protested. “You don’t understand: this, it’s all meant for you. I want you to live here. With me.” He took a breath. “I bought this house for us.”

Julia seemed taken aback. “Paul, don’t be daft.”

“I’m not,” he said.

“You are,” she countered. “You’re an excited little boy right now with a new toy and you want to share it with everyone. And I love you for it. I really do. But the novelty will wear off, and eventually you’ll get bored and something will have to give.”

Paul wanted to shake her. “So that’s it?” he asked.

“It has to be,” she said. “Cor, Paul! Could you imagine the furor if you chucked Jane for me? If we shacked up in some tony mansion together. We’d never ‘ear the end of it! Never get a moment’s peace.”

“We’d have each other,” he said. _Isn’t that enough?_ he wanted to ask her.

Julia shook her head. “Paul, forgive me, but… we both know you’ve been auditioning wives for years, and as much as you believe what you’re saying—”

He scowled. “That’s a bit unfair, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it is…” She studied him again. “But why, Paul? All these years… after everything…?”

Paul shrugged. “Because I fell in love with you,” he said. “I haven’t ever needed any other reason.”

She smiled at him, and the sun broke through up above, shining a path through the clouds and dappling the ground as it filtered through the leaves, and any lingering frustrations and disappointments disappeared. Again, Julia had proven herself capable of rendering his happiness in the most brilliant of colours in spite of his anxieties with nothing more than the cock of her head and the twitch of her lips.

“You should at least come with us on tour,” he said, entirely out of the blue and apropos of nothing. “If it goes well, and if you have a good time with me—”

At that, Julia positively dissolved into laughter. “Paul!” she said, his name tripping on her tongue, dancing with the jangle in her voice. “Now you’ve gone off yer head… on tour? With you?”

He was undeterred. “It’s not funny, and I’m not joking. You could be… wardrobe assistant. Or… something to do with photography. You could be documenting each stop, through Europe and America…” he trailed off. It suddenly sounded like not a half-bad idea; charging forward under the momentum of this thought, his voice rose in pitch. “We could hire you. We’d pay you.”

Julia shook her head and wiped tears from her eyes. “Working for you?” she asked.

“Why not?”

She scoffed. “I could think of a few—” she started, before thinking better of it. She chewed on her words. “Now be serious for a minute, Paul. There’d be press everywhere. Fans screamin’ at every stop. We’d never be alone, never be able to go anywhere. Someone’d see us…”

“We’ve kept you a secret so far,” Paul said.

“So let’s tempt fate, eh?” She shook her head. “You should take me home now,” she said. “Before you get any more wild ideas or, heaven forbid, get me to agree to any of them.”

Paul took it as a sign of a victory, however small. As he walked Julia back around to the front of his house, he was already planning how he was going to make this work…

* * *

PAUL: I think that’s what’s called a Hail Mary pass over here. It made no sense—Julia was absolutely right that none of what I’d been proposing that day was going to work—but I threw it all on the table, to see what would stick and what wouldn’t. She wasn’t open to moving in with me. Okay, fine, that was hurtful but… but she seemed somewhat open to going on tour, so that’s how I divided and focused my efforts: instead of me and Julia it would be me and Jane in the Cavendish house—I resigned myself to that—but all the while, I worked on Brian, to convince him to let Julia tour with us.

MURPHY: So you _did_ bring it to Brian?  
  
PAUL: Yes. Did it in baby steps. I brought over some of Julia’s photos to show Brian, the ones she’d had hanging at the Walker and a few others. A little portfolio. He was impressed with her talent. Less so with the fact that I wanted to install my other girlfriend as some kind of on-staff photographer. I don’t think he was going to allow it but Dick Lester—the director of _Help!_ , you know, good bloke—somehow saw her prints and liked them, so that got her onto the film set. A foot in the door.

MURPHY: How did the others react?

PAUL: Honestly, they didn’t notice for the first day or so. It wasn’t their decision to make though, because technically she was hired by the production company and not us, so it wasn’t up to them. ( _Pause_ ) But as far as I know, no one griped about it.

MURPHY: But asking her to go on tour, that was—?

PAUL: Nerve-wracking. Because any decisions we made were made by unanimous vote, and I was going to have to convince John and George and Ringo to let Julia join us. And Brian too. And I didn’t even know if Julia was going to agree… and it just so happened that the first chance I got to bring it up was the day the press found out we’d been awarded our MBEs…


	36. An Exciting Proposition

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: "[Piano and Strings](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A1t_Kc4CBU)"

* * *

 12 June 1965  
Twickenham Film Studios

“I’ll be a little while longer,” Paul said into the phone. “We’ve got a few more press interviews and then I’ll be heading back home.” He took a breath. “Hey, we’re all going ‘round to a friend’s place tonight to celebrate. I know you had yer heart set on dinner and dancin’ but—”

On the other end of the line, Jane smiled; Paul could hear it in her voice. “It’s not every day your boyfriend is honoured by the Queen,” she said. “Just tell me what to wear and when to be ready.”

“Wear whatever you like,” he said. “It’ll be casual, I think. Small. Julia’s place can’t hold many people, so—”

“Where?” she asked. “I mean, who’s hosting?”

Paul swallowed. “Julia?” he asked. “Remember—our old friend from Liverpool?”

The pause that followed raised Paul blood pressure. “Julia,” Jane said. “Oh yes, I remember.” She didn’t sound enthused, but she didn’t sound put off. Paul hated that she was an actress; he had no idea what she was actually thinking, how much of it was a put-on. “Well it’ll be nice to see her again.”

He tried to breathe easy, which was easier said than done. “I’m sure she feels the same,” he said.

Another pause. “Okay, love,” Jane said. “I should let you go. Busy busy—you know how it is.”

“Right.”

“See you tonight?”

“Yes, in a few hours, four tops,” he said, looking at his watch and realizing he had no right to make such a claim. He winced and prepared to disengage. “All right then?”

“Paul?”

He pressed the receiver to his ear. “Hm?”

“I love you.”

He closed his eyes and smiled. “I love you, too.”

“Okay,” she said, her smiling voice returning. “Goodbye.”

Paul hung up the phone, staring at it for several seconds.

“You just got back from holidaying with her,” Ringo teased as he rounded the corner. He rolled his eyes. “Young love…”

Paul mock laughed. “Hey, do you know where Brian is?”

“I’m here to collect you, actually.” Ringo pointed towards the door at the end of the hall. “Band meeting,” he added.

Paul felt a twinge of nerves, the acute drop in the pit of his stomach just the same as he got every time he mounted a stage before a show. But he hid his anxiety by standing up and smoothing the wrinkles out of his trousers. He’d finally ask the question he’d wanted to ask for weeks, the one he’d been rehearsing for moments just like this: _Brian, I’d like to ask that Julia Fitzpatrick join us as documentary photographer on our upcoming tour? You’ll see from the fine examples of her work produced over the last several weeks here at Twickenham…_

As he followed Ringo down the hall, Paul wondered at his own timing. He _had_ just come back from Portugal with Jane, and he’d had a lovely time while they were there; he’d hardly thought about Julia once. But now that he was back, in the film studios where so much of his time with Julia these days was spent, she was all he could think about.

Ringo was talking but Paul wasn’t listening. As if on cue, they passed a cavernous room where one of the camera operators was showing Julia how the film was loaded into the camera; she, ever the documentarian, was photographing as he spoke. Paul slowed, barely, to take in the sight of her—tawny trousers, mustard yellow blouse, a wide white headband holding her hair back from her face, her heavy camera in her hands, always seeing the world through its viewfinder—and to listen to the sound of her laughter pealing through the room as the man unspooled a length of already developed film and lifted it to the light so she could photograph the images captured there.

He wished, dearly, that he could find a road that made him happy. _Maybe this summer will change that_ , he thought.

“You coming, Paul?” Ringo said, coming to stand at Paul’s side. With a shake of his head, Paul came to; he wondered how long he’d been standing there. But both Julia and the cameraman had stopped what they were doing and were looking in his direction; Julia managed a small grin and waved her fingers. Smitten, Paul blushed, lifting his hand to mirror hers.

“What were you saying, Ring?”

Beside him, Ringo chuckled and sighed. “Come on. We’re late. You know how Eppy gets.”

The length of the hallway, the harsh greenish-hued fluorescent lighting, and the monotonous tiled floor came into crystal clarity. Everything before felt like a dream to Paul, and every step away from Julia was like waking up early on a weekend, with seductive sleep beckoning you back. He was alert by the time Ringo pushed open Brian’s door, and they were waved inside.

“Well,” Brian said, not missing a beat. “We’ve got a few more interviews lined up for this—”

“How many is a few?” John asked.

“Six,” Brian said, leaning back against the desk behind him.

“That’s more than a few,” George joked.

“Almost several,” John added.

Brian ignored them with a sly smile. “Are you happy with the rough edit of the film?”

Ringo nodded. “Seems fine to me.”

“Any notes?” Brian asked. “Anything at all?”

Paul cleared his throat. “I’d actually like to bring something up,” he said, looking around the room as four sets of eyes fell upon him. “Unrelated.”

Brian nodded. “What is it?”

He cleared his throat again. “I-I… well, I was actually wonderin’ if… if you’d all think it’s possible, of course… if—”

“Come on, Macca, spit it out,” John teased.

He closed his eyes and took a breath. “I’d like to know if—you know—if Julia ought join us on tour this summer,” he said. “To continue with the photography she’s been doing here in the studio, on set..."

When he opened his eyes, he didn’t see red faces and angry eyes. In fact, he was met with Ringo’s approval.

“It’s not a bad idea,” the drummer said with a thoughtful shrug.

Brian considered. “I have been rather impressed with the quality of her work,” he said. “She’s got quite an eye for this. Not that I’m surprised; her work has always been very fine.”

George opened his mouth to speak but quickly thought better of it. But his sharp intake of breath had called attention to him and, finding four sets of eyes on his face, he relented. “For the whole tour?” he asked finally.

“It would depend of course on three things,” Brian said, holding out his hand and lifting his fingers as he went. “One: she’s currently under contract and that contract must be adhered to before any new contract is entered into. Two: Julia herself has to want to do it. And three: the four of you need to agree.”

Paul hadn’t expected it to go so smoothly. He squared his shoulders, suddenly sure of himself.

Brian stepped towards the door. “I have no problem with it as long as those three conditions are met,” he said, though he stopped just short and turned to Paul. “I might add a fourth—that whatever is currently happening or might continue to happen between you and Julia be kept under wraps.” Brian paused a beat before continuing. “I don’t care what happens in your personal lives, so long as it doesn’t interfere with your professional ones.”

Paul met Brian’s eyes and held his gaze until Paul was certain he understood what Brian was hinting at. At that moment, the older man nodded. “I’ll go find Julia. Discuss it amongst yourselves.”

In a moment he was gone, and the four Beatles were alone together.

“Well?” George asked.

Paul whipped around. “Well what?”

“You really think this is a good idea, Paul?”

“I think it’d be good to have some control over images that we release, yes,” he said.

“And she’s the only photographer available, is that right? In all of London?”

It was a replay of six months earlier, standing in George’s living room, one hand clutching an engagement ring and the other in a frustrated fist at his side.

Ringo chimed in. “Look, what Brian said is right: as long as this doesn’t interfere with our professional lives, what harm can it do?”

“How do we know it won’t interfere?” George asked.

“Paul is apt to be as careful as anyone about this sort of thing,” Ringo replied. “And Julia—I mean, she’s talented, isn’t she? And we have fun.”

“Julia’s great,” George said. “This isn’t about her.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk about my relationship with Julia as though I weren’t here,” Paul chimed in.

“It’s not your relationship with _Julia_ that bothers me, Paul,” George returned. He sighed and folded his arms across his chest; then, as if for emphasis, he turned to John, still seated in the chair beside him. He hadn’t said a word since Paul’s request had been breached. “What’ve you got to say about this?”

Paul considered his best friend, stoic in his silence. What could John possibly have to say against this? Hadn’t he flown Julia to Austria to be with Paul during filming there? Wasn’t he past this?

John sat up straight and cleared his throat. “You’re going to pay her?” he asked, looking up and levelling his eyes at Paul. “An honest wage?”

“Of course,” Paul said, taken aback. “Honestly, what kind of a question—”

Paul trailed off, and John stayed silent, saying nothing for a long moment in time. Finally, he took a breath. “I say we give it a try.”

Ringo nodded. “Me too.”

“Me three,” Paul added.

George shrugged, nodded his head, falling in line. “Okay then,” he said. “That’s settled.”

Paul, buoyant, couldn’t help but smile. As if on cue, the door to the office opened, and Brian stepped in, followed by Julia.

“Lads?” Brian asked.

“Four for four,” Paul smiled.

“Hello boys,” Julia smiled, her face flushing red as she realised that she was the sudden centre of attention. Her camera hung around her neck; hands free, she perched them on her hips. “What’s this about?” She quizzically furrowed her brow as she looked around the room, meeting each Beatle’s gaze. “Okay, what is it?” she asked.

Brian put a gentle hand in the small of her back and led her to the chair beside his desk. “We have a rather exciting proposition for you…”

* * *

PAUL: It was easy, come to think of it. That part, anyway. There would be contracts to sign, but Brian would draw them up later. ( _Pause_ ) He was always so respectful of Julia. He liked her immensely. I don’t think he would have put up with her if he hadn’t. But he never—not once—let on that he knew about us, not to her. And that was sort of… gallant, in a way. ( _Pause_ ) If anyone knew what it meant to have a private life be _so private_ that no one was allowed to see, it was him. He never judged us, not once, for the things we did in private, you know. “Safe, careful, and discreet,” remember. Those were his only words on the matter. Instructions for how to conduct this business.

MURPHY: But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that you weren’t always safe, careful, or discreet…


	37. Up on the Roof

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: "[Sally's Tomato](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SslYwr5Mci8)" / "[Sleepless](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTlpy-9hnS4)" / "[Girl](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtWvNoC8fAo)" / "[Night Electricity Theme](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggXF8p9CvLk&list=OLAK5uy_m628SGXtpmEyMYJVeNvzJ4HGm5BkYMvYE&index=3&t=0s)"

* * *

JOHN: Having Julia at the film studio had been a trip, let me tell you. ( _Pause_ ) Are you married, Detective Wilson?

WILSON: No, I’m not.

JOHN: Well… imagine working alongside the person you’re sleeping with. Imagine that they spend all day doing their job, and their job is to pay attention to you, to watch you, and simultaneously ignore you, and you ignore them. And then at the end of the day—maybe just one day a week—you get to unglue them and put them back together again with your hands, your lips, every part of your body working towards that goal… you get the point.

WILSON: …Vividly.

JOHN: It was sensational. I had no reason to complain. Even if it was only a handful of hours together once a week, they were pure bliss, just me and her in the mews house. Her mews house. Things were actually about as good as they could have been. As good as they’d _ever_ been. But then Paul had to go and—( _Pause_ ) He’d done what I couldn’t do, which was to secure a potential future for her. A _good_ future, a good job, something that she could easily parley into a career. Her tomorrows were winning out over her todays, to put it in her words. I hadn’t realised until that day just how instrumental he was in all of that. It soured everything.

WILSON: What did you do about it?

JOHN: ( _Sigh_ ) I went to a party at her house. And then nearly everything fell apart.

* * *

13 June 1965  
Weymouth Mews  
Very early morning… 

John leaned back against the wooden planter behind him, filled with fragrant lavender bushes that Julia and George had taken great pains to transplant from someone’s back garden— _Was it Brian’s? George’s? Hell, was it mine?_ he wondered—several weeks earlier, when the first vernal blush had settled over the capital. Now, the warmth of the blossoming late spring night spread up and out away from him, folding its velvet around the tops of Victorian buildings stretching as far as he could see in all directions. Here, in the heart of Marylebone, in an oasis of his own high above the West End traffic noise and the excitement inside Julia’s flat, with his guitar in his lap, still floating on the high from the last joint smoked downstairs, he was alone; he was safe.

It had been Julia’s idea to throw the impromptu party that night, to celebrate the MBE announcement; the secondary celebration of her recent promotion—a summer-long tour of Europe and America, being paid the positively princely sum of £15 a week, plus expenses—was a secret one. But she had been on cloud nine all evening, surrounded as she’d been by the guests who had been summoned on the hastily-assembled list. Only a select few from their inner circle made the cut—the kinds of people who could be counted on to remain discreet about addresses and locations and people; Mal and Neil, the girls, George Martin, carefully chosen friends from the studio and their publicist’s office—specifically chosen for their ability to respect their privacy, much to Brian’s relief. It had to be carefully orchestrated, all the way down to transportation—unmarked, nondescript cars were arranged for to take guests to and from the party, just as had been done regularly since John and Paul had first devised their own transportation plan six months earlier, the night of the last Dead Mother’s Society meeting. It had all been thought up by Julia and it had all been set off without a hitch.

But as the evening wore on and people drifted in and out of the mews, the core four remained; Ringo and a now-visibly pregnant Maureen, snuggled in a corner in Julia’s front room the entire night, George and Pattie mingling and drinking, Paul and Jane, relaxed and tanned after Portugal.

And John.

John, who had arrived late, and solo… who hadn’t wanted to go at all… who regretted his decision the moment he set foot in Julia’s front door and was greeted to the sight of Paul standing too close to Julia, their backs to the wall near the base of the stairs, engrossed in conversation with a group of people standing around them… Paul’s hand in the lower curve of her spine… covert fingertips slo-o-o-o-owly smoothing the fabric of Julia’s shirt… right up until the moment Jane slid her way into his other side and Paul’s divided attention shifted to his girlfriend.

The nearly two months spent at Twickenham together had been joyful for John beyond his wildest imaginings. But the afternoon’s developments had underscored the deep conversation they’d had in Obertauern and had revealed little to him beyond what he’d already known and had been suppressing for weeks: that this was a cock-up of a situation, and that nothing that happened was going to go well for him. He’d managed to keep his jealousies in check for a hot minute, engrossed in The Work during the day and stealing away to Julia’s whenever she’d chance to let him know that she’d carved a day out of the week and was setting it aside with the implicit understanding that they were there for his use alone. But now, he wasn’t feeling any closer, any happier, any more sated, than he had before.

The walls were closing in, and he was running out of air.

He lasted an hour on the main floor, watching Paul and Julia exchange secret looks across the crowded room, before stealing away to the roof, which is where he’d been for the last who-knows-how-long. Up here, nothing could bother him.

 _Not even them,_ he thought as he closed his eyes and rested his back against the still-sunshine-warm wood, for the first time in a long time, contentment replaced his anxiety. He’d brought a guitar from Julia’s room—not the one tuned for Paul’s left hand but the second one, the one John had brought over, the one that stayed tucked in a closet in her would-be dark room except for the nights when he stayed, when the door downstairs was bolted against the world and it was just the two of them…

He didn’t have the faintest idea how he would survive the summer tour in such close proximity to them both.

John absently strummed his guitar around chords in this song, the newest one on his mind, and blocked out the faraway din from the rooms beneath his feet, midnight choruses that seemed to move from room to room until he finally heard them in the cobbled laneway beyond Julia’s blue door.

Curious, he lifted himself to his feet and made his way closer to the edge, four floors above the street.

“Where to now, fellas?”

“Pick a place, any place.”

“The night is young!”

“Where’s John?”

“After you, George Harrison, MBE.”

“No, after you, Richard Starkey, MBE.”

“Well, technically we’re not MBEs until—”

John peeked over the edge and watched as the figures down below teetered on drunken feet, making their goodbyes on Julia’s stoop, their girlfriends on their arms. He could hear Julia’s voice but couldn’t see her, didn’t dare poke his head out over the shingled top of the low stone wall that ran around the perimeter of her rooftop space. Something about being hidden, with a bird’s eye vantage over the scene below, thrilled him to no end.

But he heard her reply. “You lot are going to get us all found out, and then this place’ll be crawling with your barmy fans and I’m gonna have to find a new place to live. Is that yer brilliant plan eh?” She scoffed. “A commendation from ‘er Majesty and you’re suddenly actin’ too big fer yer britches. What’ll I do with yeh?”

John smiled. He could imagine the way she looked as she berated them—arms crossed, head cocked to the side, shaking it slowly as she smirked in spite of it all. He beamed from within, filled with a soft kind of pride at the way she kept them all in check, the way only a Northern bird could do.

“You’ll love us anyway, won’t yeh, Jules?” Ringo drawled, and John’s heart surged at the sound of her laughter.

The conversation grew quieter, punctuated only by the occasional joyful voice. John keened his ears but couldn’t hear a thing more; the voices died down as the group disappeared into the night, toward the car parked in a dark corner, waiting to drive them home.

He wasn’t at all concerned about the fact that they were going to leave him there; he didn’t care that word would eventually make its way back to Cynthia, at home with Julian, that he had disappeared at some point during the night at the home of the woman she very likely suspected he was having an affair with. He didn’t even care what Brian might say at his vanishing act, in spite of the lecture he’d given Paul that afternoon about discretion.

All he could think about was the fact that, finally, he was going to be alone with Julia…

By the time he’d made up his mind to go down and find her wherever she was in the quiet stillness of her home, he heard the unmistakable sounds of her footfalls on the stairs, the creak on the third tread from the top of the second landing, the groan of the bannister as she rounded the last landing and came to enter her bedroom below him—sounds that were as intimately familiar to him as those of his own home, of every home he’d ever lived in. Heart in his throat, he counted the treads—ten, nine, eight—on the wrought iron spiral staircase that would take her from the corner beside her dressing table to the rooftop door, listening for the tinny, metallic _twang_ of the hinge as she pushed it open.

“Thought I’d find you up here.”

John turned to look at her. Silhouetted against the pale light filtering up from her bedroom, she looked like a phantom, hazy and formless. She had two glasses and what appeared to be a half bottle of wine in her hand.

“You did, did you?”

She grinned, eyes not leaving his as she stepped forward and toed the door closed with her bare foot. She was humming a song—one John recognized, one he liked; “ _There’s room enough for two up on the roof,”_ she whisper sang, smiling. With deliberate slowness, she padded softly against the wood planks that served as the walkways between her planters until she was at his side. There, she first set the glasses on the edge of the planter and then the bottle before sinking to the wood at his side.

“What’re you workin’ on?” she asked.

John wrapped his left hand around the neck of the guitar in his lap, just this side of the capo, and ran his thumb over the strings, forming chords in the air around them: E minor… B seven… E minor…

“Nothin’,” he told her. “A new song.”

As he continued to whisper over the strings, he felt Julia’s lips press against his shoulder. He opened his eyes and stopped playing, turning his head to look at her.

“Everyone’s gone now?” he asked.

“Yeah. Just left.”

“How about that?”

Julia reached over and lifted the bottle and the two long-stemmed glasses. Yanking the cork out of the bottle with her teeth, she poured the remnants of the bottle—red wine, John noticed, though that was all he could tell and was as far as his interest would take him, anyway—evenly into the two glasses and handed one to him.

“Congrats on the MBE,” she said as she tipped the edge of her glass toward his, clinking them together in a toast.

John had almost forgotten entirely about the _raison d’être_ for the evening. As Julia took her first drink from her glass, he made a face. “Couldn’t care less about it,” he told her.

Julia frowned. “Not keen on meeting the Queen are yeh?”

“Doesn’t change a thing,” he said, setting down his wine glass, untouched. “Except now we’ll have a nice medal to pin to our tuxedos when we go out to fancy dinner parties, won’t we?”

“Well I think it’s nice.”

He set his jaw. “You would wouldn’t you?” he said. “Everything’s comin’ up Julia these days. One boyfriend buys you a house and the other lands you a nice, new job.”

Julia recoiled; her eyes reflected every bit of hurt John expected to see and then some. He felt like an ass.

“Now why’d you have to go and say something like that?” she whispered.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, yeah?” He was determined not to have a row with Julia, not during a time when he and she could be he-and-she, alone together. He wasn’t going to sabotage this. Instead, he picked up his guitar again and began to strum; it was enough to change the topic.

She drew her knees up and rested her elbows on top, her wine glass perched between her fingertips as she listened.

“What’s it called?”

John turned to face her, still strumming, as he began to hum, to sing. _“She’s the kind of girl you want so much it makes you sorry… still you don’t regret a single day…”_

Julia smirked, drawing her lower lip between her teeth for a moment. “So it’s about yer moggy then, eh?”

Looking at her, lit by reflections in the fragrant air around them, John was utterly smitten. He allowed himself a smile, lowered the guitar from his lap, and leaned into the barest of space still left between them to kiss her. Their lips had barely touched, however, when the unmistakable sounds of footsteps in the mews alleyway echoed up to their ears. Stilled, Julia trained her ears on the street below; John’s initial thought was that they’d been discovered. But when her doorbell rang, followed by a series of rhythmically playful knocks, her eyes flew open.

“Don’t come down,” she said to him as she pushed herself to her feet and hurried back inside.

Ignoring her entirely, John followed, leaning in to the crack in the doorway, listening to Julia as she descended into her house. He heard the door open, and as it happened, the sound of her conversation bounced off the walls of the entryway and up the stairwell until it released into her bedroom.

“I ‘ad to see yeh,” Paul’s voice came up first. “I’ve missed yeh.”

“Not tonight.”

“It’s been two weeks, Jules.”

“You can wait another day… I have to clean up.”

“Do it tomorrow.”

“Paul…”

“I came all the way back here,” he protested. “I left Jane at home.”

“I didn’t ask yeh to do that.”

“But I did it. For you… everything’s for you…”

John listened as hard as he could for as long as he could until the sounds became muffled and he knew what was happening. His face burned; heart in his ears, stomach bottomed, he left his spot at the door and went back to the wine and his guitar. Both glasses were gone in a matter of seconds. The guitar sat mute in his lap.

He had no idea how much time passed, but the effects of the wine had begun to  fog his vision, and that plus the combination of furious envy had—he was certain of it—brightened his face in shades of crimson he was only too glad to hide beneath the inky cover of darkness. When he became dimly aware of Julia’s presence on the rooftop again, he realised he’d entirely lost track of time.

John tried to refrain from eye contact, but he couldn’t help but notice that she’d changed her clothes; gone was the soft turtleneck she’d been wearing, the black skirt, replaced with a thin dressing gown. He kept his eyes on the empty glasses in front of him as she reclaimed her spot at his side.

“He’s gone,” she told him.

“That so?”

He knew he was hurting her but he couldn’t help himself. His jealousy, fuelled by drink, made it impossible.

“I didn’t let him…,” she trailed off, motioning with her hand briefly before her shoulders sagged. “You know. Inside me.”

 _No wonder you changed your clothes_ , John scoffed. The image of his friend and his girl against a wall or on a table or right there on the floor, rutting like animals amongst the detritus of the party, staining her dress… it nearly did him in.

Still, he said nothing.

“I had to do something,” she urged. “He would still be here. He wouldn’t have left without it. And he could have found you.”

Still, John said nothing. From the corner of his eye, he saw Julia’s barefoot at the end of her her bare leg— _Legs that wrapped around his waist… thighs parted… ankles locked… pulling him in…_ he shook his head to clear the images—tapping nervously against the wooden plank beneath her.

“You only do it when he wants to?” John asked. “Is that how it works? You do what Paul—what all your men—want you to do, when they want you to do it?”

She sighed. “What would _you_ have me do, John?”

“I don’t ask you for much.”

“Oh really?” she accused. “‘I’m coming over, be ready in fifteen minutes.’ ’Drop everything and fly to Austria.’ ‘Here’s a house, Julia. Live in it.’”

He snapped. “Forgive me for trying to make yer life a bit easier, Jules.”

“There’s nothing _easy_ about any of this.”

John shook his head. “Tell him. Tell ‘im everything.”

“Why?”

John squeezed his index finger around his thumb. “Because I’m asking you to. Because _that’s_ what _I_ want you to do.”

“You want me to what?” she asked. “Break a man’s heart? Ruin your friendship? End your career?”

 _If it means you’re all mine?_ John was suddenly willing—oh-so-willing—to throw it all away.

The fact that he didn’t answer her immediately rattled her and she made it plain that she wasn’t pleased. She shook her head. “Don’t be ridiculous, Lennon.”

“I love you.”

Having said it, out loud and for the first time, John shocked even himself. But nothing matched the look in Julia’s eyes as she stared back at him. The flush of ravishment sat against the hollows of her cheek and the tops of her breasts, in the plump fullness of her lips, and even though he knew what had put it there, John suddenly didn’t care. The same urgent need to reclaim what he so desperately wanted to be his and his alone overtook him. He shoved his guitar from his lap, knocking over one of the stemmed glasses and shattering it against the ground.

“John—”

He moved against her, capturing her with one arm and lowering them both to the rough wooden ground with the other. Muffling her moans against him, he kissed her, hard, revelling in the sound of her surprise caught in the back of her throat, wondering if the unfamiliar taste in her mouth was Paul, suddenly bewildered over how that made him feel.

“I need you,” he growled, pulling away long enough to breathe into a new line of attack, kissing his way down the side of her neck, following the well-worn trail that always led to her arousal. The way her body felt—how she rose to his touch, the subtle ways she leaned against him, the pliability suffusing her skin—told him more than he could have guessed: whatever had happened downstairs had absolutely been for Paul’s benefit alone and not Julia’s.

Still, he had to ask. Because he had to hear her answer.

“Did he make you come?” John growled as his lips and tongue met the top of her breast. She inhaled a sharp breath, and he felt her knees open enough to give him room to move.

 _Selfish prick_ , John thought, casting his venom towards his bandmate, scurrying away from his tryst and back to the relative safety of his posh home around the corner, completely sated and leaving _this_ woman gasping in his wake. Fire burned in his veins as he ran his hand up Julia’s thigh. He shoved her panties aside; she was warm, and wet, and John slipped two fingers within her, burying himself deep as Julia writhed.

“Did he make you come?” he asked again, curling his fingers.

Julia gasped and shook her head as she answered, her voice half-pitched in the back of her throat. She lifted her hand, reaching for the length of him, and John—in a fit of self-righteous indignation over his own non-response, embarrassed at his sudden inability to achieve an erection and cursing the fact that it was entirely the fault of his own active imagination—wrenched her hand away, lacing his fingers together with hers and bringing it it down to her side, where he pinned it to the ground.

“Do you want _me_ to make you come?”

Julia nodded.

“Say it.”

“Yes,” she breathed. “Please...”

It was all he needed to pull himself down and duck his head between her legs.

* * *

John had the guitar in his lap again, strumming slowly and whisper-singing his lyrics to avoid waking Julia, resting her head against his thigh. Hanging low in the sky, the nearly full morning moon had finally asserted its supremacy, sapping the remaining warmth from the upper terrace; John had thrown his jacket over Julia’s shivering shoulders, ignoring for a moment his own chill as he channelled it all into his song, this new one, the one destined for a spot on their next album.

The lyrics had been almost entirely his, with very little input from Paul, as was increasingly the case. It had written itself, the words dripping out of him and onto the page; he hadn’t given it too much thought at the time, about the song and its subject. But as he sat strumming the song once more for the rooftops of Marylebone, with her head warmly resting against him, it was impossible not to finish the equation.

He felt her eyes on him, he looked down and saw that she was watching him, intently, no longer keeping up the pretence of slumber. He let go of the guitar.

“Don’t you worry they’ll find out?”

“Who?”

Julia chewed her lip. “Cynthia. Paul,” she said. “The way you write…”

“You’re not the only person I could write a song about.”

His words, however true they might have been, were too harsh and he knew it. But Julia seemed to take it in stride. He was almost immediately sorry that he’d snapped at her, and he knew she wasn’t the real target; but no apology was forthcoming. Instead, he hummed along the melody line again, eyes fixed on some distant point, a light in the distance, the silhouette of someone moving against a window, evidence that the world out there beyond the parapet was real and alive and would soon wake up from its slumber.

“‘ _Pain would lead to pleasure_ …’,” Julia whispered.

“Hm?” John lied. He’d heard every word, each one like a knife, their meaning plainly obvious. Playing dumb was easier than confronting the truth.

But Julia didn’t answer him. Instead she turned her face up until their eyes met. “You’ve changed me, you know?”

He relaxed his hand, letting it fall from the strings as he brushed some loose hair from her face. “How’s that?” he asked.

Julia shrugged. “Remember back home?” she asked. “When we first met?”

He nodded.

A shiver ran through Julia’s body as her eyes drifted away from his. She looked up into the sky above them, gazing at the stars. “I was so afraid,” she said. “The pain and hurt… “

John knew what she was getting at. He blinked and looked away, suddenly uncomfortable. “What about it?”

She shrugged. “I’m not afraid anymore,” she admitted. “Being with you, it… you gave me something… I don’t know.”

He looked down at her, trying to read her and hoping to end the conversation entirely and as quickly as possible. “What’d I give yeh?”

Julia shrugged again. “Courage, maybe.”

“Courage to do what?” he asked.

Once more, Julia scrunched her shoulders up to her ears. “To put myself together?”

It didn’t make sense, and she knew it. Perplexed, John didn’t offer a reply. He simply couldn’t. A long moment passed between them in virtual silence. The sky in the eastern horizon began to tint. John had no idea how he was going to get home. He wondered if he could call Brian, maybe Mal or Neil, briefly considered walking home, all the way out to the suburbs, he didn’t care…

“I _was_ told that, you know,” she whispered, breaking his train of thought.

“Hm?”

“From your song,” she said. “‘It’ll hurt now but you’ll like it later.’ That’s exactly what he told me.” She craned her neck to look at him. “How did you know that?”

It took John a moment to catch up but when he did, and her eyes met his, directly, there was fire there. Cold, hard fire. It was a look he hadn’t seen in ages.

_Ever since the incident with Dick and the car… when he cut her on the street and she’d fallen into his arms for the first time…_

Her voice trembled as she spoke. “You don’t like that I’m with Paul, eh?” she asked. “There was a time when I couldn’t’ve been. Not like this. I didn’t understand how to relate to it. How to relate to men. I just knew what they wanted from me, and what I wanted from them is to be left alone, so it was…” she trailed off.

 _Sex as a transaction,_ he thought. _You give them what they want and they give you what you want_ _._ It all suddenly made a terrible amount of sense.

She sighed before continuing. “You want to blame someone for this, hm? Well, you can blame your hands, and your mouth, and your body, and your words, John, for the way this has turned out,” she told him. “I’ve been having sex for ten years. I’ve hated the _very idea_ of sex, of fucking, for ten years. But I don’t think I’d ever made love…”

She’d lost him. He had no idea what she was talking about. But as he tried to parse her meaning, she finished what she’d started.

Dumbstruck, John watched as Julia pushed herself up onto one elbow—his jacket, still draped over her shoulders, slipped down her arm, taking the soft sleeve of her nightgown with it, exposing her breast. She didn’t cover it; she simply looked down, marvelling at the border where her skin met the charged air around them, as if it were the first time she’d ever seen herself laid bare before. The mask of her face changed, quick as that; gone was the fire, and her grey eyes warmed, softened, and John was reminded of the charcoal in the cupboards years earlier at the Art College. If he’d tried to draw her face in that instant, he was certain that’s what he would have used; it was the only medium that could possibly work.

Then, Julia leaned down and planted a soft kiss against the squishy softness of his right side, between his hip and his navel; that pudginess, which he’d poked and prodded, that he hated so much, when pressed against her lips was suddenly his favourite part of himself. Her kiss was the single tenderest thing he’d ever experienced.

She breathed into him. “Paul has me in ways you’ve _never_ had, that’s true. Many men have. But it’s because _you_ had me _first._ Truly and deeply…” she told him, adding in a voice as soft as the ever-lightening sky on the horizon. “You made me into this. This is your doing.”

He didn’t care about the accusation, or about the the notion that what she said might actually be true. John’s heart surged in his chest and he suddenly wanted nothing more than this, this very moment, for now and forever, for all of his days.

“I need to tell ‘im, Julia,” he said.

She pulled away, sitting to her full height, and considered his words for the briefest of moments. “Tell him, don’t tell him. It’s entirely up to you,” she said, with the weary sigh of a person consigned to the fact that they didn’t care about keeping up the pretenses anymore.

He’d never heard her sound so tired.

“Come ‘ead,” she said at last. “London’s waking up. The offices’ll open soon. I’ll get dressed and then I’ll drive yeh home.”

John could scarcely believe the hour but he knew she was right. Within ten minutes, they’d extricated themselves from the secret world on the roof and were descending into the bowels of the mews house, to the small garage that had once housed the dentist’s car, which now housed Julia’s Citroën.

The sky was streaked in purplish-grey as they pulled into the cobbled mews, still dim enough to obscure faces and features. But as they pulled under the covered entrance to the mews and awaited their chance to turn into Weymouth Street, where the streetlights were a bit brighter and the light had begun to pitch the street in pale, new daylight colour again, John saw something that set him to shivering: a group of half a dozen young women, standing on the street corner, looking up and down the street, awaiting a Beatle sighting.

“Fuck,” he said.

“What?”

“Fans.”

“What?” she asked. “How do you know?”

He ducked low in his seat and pulled his hat down over his face; the girls were on Julia’s side of the car, and he hoped there was enough darkness yet in the pre-dawn to hide him until they were safely away. But he heard their voices.

_“Who’s in that car?”_

_“I’ve never seen it before.”_

_“Do you think it could be?”_

_“That’s not one of their cars!”_

_“But what if it’s him?!”_

_“Where are the others?!”_

John felt himself break into a cold sweat. “Just drive, Julia,” he said.

Julia stepped on the gas and accelerated into the gap in traffic, turning into the street and away from the girls, who—John could only hope—had not identified him.

He had no idea how he kept coming so close to losing her; this time it was nearly to the ugliness of the reflected limelight that all their friends were subjected to, that he’d managed—until now—to keep off her front door.

It made him physically ill.

He leaned his head against the window and focused hard on not throwing up.

* * *

JOHN: As it turned out, Paul had been careless leaving the Ashers on his way back to see Julia, and a couple of fans staking out the street saw him leave. They lost him soon after but word got out, as it often did, and within a few hours there were a dozen or so girls walking the streets of Marylebone trying to pick up the trail as it were. ( _Pause_ ) I never understood how they did it, why they did it, what kind of parents allowed their daughters—I mean, these weren’t chidlren but they weren’t always grown women either, they were teenagers!—to roam the streets of London on the hunt for a fucking Beatle...

WILSON: Did they actually see you?

JOHN: No, we were lucky. But the rumours had started and once that happened, that was it. Now we knew that people would be on the lookout. These fans were smart. Driven. No one had any doubts about their abilities to sniff out a story. ( _Pause_ ) I was angry over it at first. But when everything came crashing down and Brian really laid into Paul about his lack of discretion… then I really felt low. That loss…

WILSON: Of what?

JOHN: The sanctity of it, I suppose. The mews house was never going to be the same as it was. Nothing was going to be the same.


	38. Enough

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: "[A Presence Felt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyQSli0yD0A)" / "[Miniature No. 7](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3bWG8hj6qo)"

* * *

PAUL: I was stupid and naive. Impulsive. I didn’t notice that they’d been following me. Thank god I lost them, however unconsciously I’d done it, or else they’d have found Julia right away and everything would have gone to shit. ( _Pause_ ) But really, as it was, it went to shit pretty much straight away anyway, especially once Brian found out…

* * *

18 June 1965  
NEMS London Office  
13 Monmouth Street 

The BBC European Service interview ended after a meagre half hour. The foursome, plus Brian, adjourned for the day; Paul thought perhaps he’d gotten off light. But it hadn’t taken long for word to reach him that Brian wanted him to stay behind. It was, without hyperbole, like being called down to the headmaster’s; Paul felt his stomach twist into knots and his knees weaken with every passing moment.

The worst of it had been the day after, when John had called Paul to tell him that fans had spotted him leaving Julia’s after the party. Paul immediately called Brian. Within hours, Julia had been moved to a hotel. A couple of NEMS employees had been dispatched to the mews to get a sense for how much the fans had been able to piece together. The plans were all sensible enough. But the quiet disappointment in their manager’s voice had been enough to unseat Paul; he wondered if today would be the moment when anger took hold. He honestly had no idea what to expect.

For now, he waited. Brian was on a call. John sat at his side in the conference room.

He wasn’t sure how he felt about the idea that, of all of them, John had been the one who had decided to stay after Brian had summoned Paul to his office. It might have been out of solidarity; it might have been out of malice. In this moment, Paul chose the former. He needed a friend.

“I haven’t slept,” he said softly. “I feel so sick over this.”

“Imagine how Julia feels,” John said. “She can’t even go home.”

Paul shook his head. “Maybe it’s nothing,” he said. “We don’t even know what they know. What they saw.”

John folded his hands. “I’m sure we’ll find out.”

The door opened behind them, and Paul stood up. Brian shut the door behind him.

“Thank you for staying,” he said. “This won’t take long.”

“Brian, I—”

“It’s not as bad as it could’ve been,” Brian said. “We think the girls who saw you saw only enough to know it was you and not where you were going. It was pure coincidence that they happened to be on that corner when they saw her car.” He paused. “But we think there’s a photograph.”

Paul groaned inwardly.

“It’s just a rumour,” Brian said, trying to be reassuring. “But it sounds like one of the girls on the street had an instant camera and she managed to get off one poor quality photograph, of the side of it—the white Citroën—and of Julia’s face in profile. The girl who took it is less interested in the driver of the car than its passenger but even though she can’t see who it is, she’s not convinced it’s nothing.”  

“The Beatlefan Brain Trust on the case,” John added. “I feel better already.”

Paul was only halfway relieved. “They don’t know where she lives then?”

“No,” Brian said. “At least not yet. But the area is under a magnifying glass already. It wouldn’t take much of a slip up for this to happen again.”

“It won’t,” Paul countered.

“Oh, I know it won’t,” Brian replied. “You won't be going back to Miss Fitzpatrick’s home for a while. Not until this blows over.”

Paul was crestfallen. “But you think it _will_ blow over?” he asked.

“I can’t say,” Brian replied. “If we can keep this to just the dozen or so girls who are currently involved, I think the collective memory of your fanbase won’t much outlive the summer where this is concerned.”

Paul shrugged. “Well that’s fine. Julia won’t even be there,” he said. “Do you think she needs protection?”

“That’s another thing,” Brian continued. “She can’t come on tour. Not now. Not after this.”

At that, even John sat up in his chair. Paul flexed his fingers, laced together as they were on the table. “She can’t?”

Brian shook his head. “This was far too close a call for comfort, but it could be controlled because it’s here, in London, and we have people here to help. In the fishbowl that would be our touring caravan, with press and fans everywhere and all eyes on you—and with a photograph already out there and fans willing to speculate—all it would take would be one _single_ image of one of you with Miss Fitzpatrick for the whole thing to fall apart.” He took a breath and levelled his eyes at Paul. “Right now, it’s hearsay coupled with a grainy, poorly lit photograph of nothing much at all. The wrong place at the wrong time and now they’ve got her name, her occupation, and from there it’s not long until they’re camped outside _her_ door now, too.”

Paul felt panic rising in his chest. “Isn’t she better off with us?” he asked.

“They don’t know who she is, Paul,” John said. “The minute she joins our entourage, that’s the match.”

He felt so stupid. Monumentally stupid. “I wish I’d never gone back to the mews…”

“We’ve already explained the situation to Miss Fitzpatrick,” Brian said. “We’ll honour the contract terms. She’ll photograph a number of other NEMS performances in London this summer, and she’ll be well-paid for her work.” Brian looked up. “In the meantime, she’s staying—at our expense—in a very nice hotel. She’ll have to get rid of her car—”

“I’ll arrange that,” Paul interjected.

“It’s already done,” Brian said. “In a week, ten days at the most, she will have a new vehicle, and she’ll be able to move back home. And you’ll be in Italy. And then France, and Spain, and then America…”

Paul leaned back in his chair.

“Now,” Brian continued, leaning forward across the table. “I have to ask: what in the _world_ were you thinking going back to Weymouth Mews that night on foot? Alone?”

Paul rolled his eyes. “I _wasn’t_ thinking.”

Brian turned to John. “And why were you still at Miss Fitzpatrick’s at five in the morning?”

It was a question that Paul hadn’t thought to ask John; but as the question arrived all the same, Paul was suddenly very interested in the answer.

John, for his part, said little. When he finally did, he leaned back in his chair, affecting an air of nonchalance. “I went upstairs for a smoke and locked myself on the roof,” he said. “Julia found me sleeping up there and drove me home.”

Paul locked eyes with John, and for a moment neither one of them moved, uttered a word, or dared to breathe. When John was the first to break away, Paul’s shuddering sigh nearly ripped his lungs from his chest.

Brian nodded. “Well,” he said. “I think we’ve all learned something from this. A painful lesson, but a lesson nonetheless.”

With the meeting over and Brian on his way out the door, all that was left for Paul to do was get up and leave, go home, finish packing for the tour. But he couldn’t bring himself to get up. And across from him at the table, neither could John. They sat there across from one another for several minutes in stony silence.

“I’m sorry, Paul,” John said.

“Me too,” Paul replied.

“But really, it’s for the best.”

“Mm.” Paul chewed on his lower lip. “Say John… when you and Julia are alone, what do you talk about?”

It wasn’t the question he wanted to ask but it was the one that tumbled from his lips.

“Usually the stock market,” he replied. “She’s a keen investor.”

“I’m serious.”

John sighed. “We aren’t alone together very much,” he said. “So we don’t do much talkin’.”

Paul quirked an eyebrow. “You locked yourself on the roof?” he asked. “Really?”

John shrugged. “It was a weird day,” he said. “Too much to drink. Too much to smoke.”

“How come you never told me that?”

“Because it’s fuckin’ embarrassing, Paul, that’s why.”

Paul looked down at the table and tried to shake his paranoia.

“Come on, love,” John teased. “Let me take you out fer a big birthday lunch.”

“Oh right,” Paul allowed a small smile. “I’d forgotten…”

John pushed his chair back and stood up. “What would you do without me?”

Paul gained his feet and walked with John to the door, but as he did, the questions lingered.

* * *

Later That Night…

“I’m not mad Paul.”

Paul stared straight ahead at the small nightlight at the end of the hall. He sniffled and took a breath.

“Julia…”

“I’m _not_ mad,” she said through sniffles of her own. “Stop pesterin’ me.”

“You’re lying.”

He sat on the floor with the telephone extension pressed to his ear. It had been a risk to call Julia from John’s place, where he was set to crash in a spare room, as he’d done on so many nights before. Cynthia was asleep not far from where he was sitting. If she heard him going on like this…

“I wish I could see you.”

“Well you can’t,” she snapped. “You saw to that, didn’t you.”

“You _are_ mad.”

Julia sighed. “I’m frustrated,” she said. “I just wanted to live my life, Paul. I was happy. And then you lot had to turn up again, and now it’s all this. Hiding out in a hotel, alone, eating room service.” She scoffed. “If I need a change of clothes, I have to telephone Brian Epstein and he sends a girl to my house to pack a suitcase, did you know that?”

Paul bristled. “It’s hardly my fault that they saw you,” he said. “You should be mad at John—”

Paul thought back to the conversation that afternoon, and John’s admission that he’d been locked on the roof and went undiscovered until the early morning. He sat up against the wall and rubbed his nose.

“He says he was locked on your rooftop patio,” Paul said.

There was a long pause before Julia replied. “He was.”

Paul shook his head. “Don’t lie to me,” he spoke, his voice low and even. “That door doesn’t lock. It barely latches closed at all. I know that, and you know that, and John—”

Another silence. “I was just driving him home…”

“Were you?”

Julia sighed. “What are you accusin’ me of, Paul?” she asked. “Because if yer gonna accuse me, you’d better fuckin’ get ‘round to it soon because I’m not staying on the phone all night while you beat your way to your point.”

Paul was silent. He had nothing; no reply.

“I’m glad I’m not goin’ on tour,” she muttered at last. “It’s the perfect opportunity to set this to rights.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, suddenly panicked.

“I mean it’s over. It’s done. We can’t see each other anymore.”

Paul began to laugh; tinny, manic laughter, trilling off his vocal cords. “Julia, come on…”

“I’m serious Paul,” she said, and from the tone of her voice, Paul knew she wasn’t lying. “This was a wake-up. All of it, it’s ridiculous. It has to end.”

“Don’t do this, Julia,” he begged, feeling the same sense of panic rising in his throat. “I can’t do this without you.”

“Yes you can,” she said. “It’ll be easy. You just take everything you feel for me and you feel it for Jane instead.” She paused. “She’s a lovely girl. She deserves better than this.”

“Stop,” he said.

He heard her hitch a sob on the other end of the line. “Trust me, it’s better this way, for everyone.”

“Not for me.”

Another sob. “Send me a postcard from Santa Monica,” Julia said, quickly, hurriedly, before adding: “Happy Birthday.” Then she hung up.

Paul sat in silence. He counted to ten. He closed his eyes and opened them again. He pinched himself. And then, just before he began to cry, he stood up and walked straight into John’s music room, where he knew he’d find him fiddling with songs, making demos, composing and experimenting.

“It’s over,” he said to John’s back.

John spun around to look at Paul, and when he did, the dam broke. Paul fell to pieces.

* * *

JOHN: I couldn't just let it go like that... so I did what he'd done.

WILSON: Which was?  
  
JOHN: I rang her up.

* * *

 “You’ve broken him.”

“He’ll survive.”

“You’ll break _me_.”

“And you’ll survive, too.”

John had put Paul to bed an hour earlier, forcing him to get up and head down to the sunroom with him; there John had set him up in an armchair, a patchwork quilt on his slim frame and a cat on his lap, where Paul had cried himself to sleep. Still and silent, John sat chain-smoking cigarettes, the room pitched black in the middle of the early summer night, with the TV on until the programming day ended. He’d thought about Paul’s slurred words, sorrow-drunk and devastated at the idea that Julia was giving up on him; he hadn’t wanted to believe it. So now he lay, with the phone caught between his ear and his shoulder, listening to his own version of the same conversation that had forced Paul to his knees. Tears stung his eyes but he wouldn’t let himself cry them.

“He doesn’t believe yer story by the way.”

John felt cold fire in his chest. “About the roof?”

A pause. “He’s gonna figure this out, if he hasn’t already.”

At one point in time, not so long ago— _Less than a week_ , John reasoned—he’d have been thrilled to pieces thinking about their tawdry affair being exposed for what it was, about Paul discovering them and the whole thing finally being out in the open. But now, after seeing Paul in apoplexies brought on by the loss of her, he had no stomach for it any more. There was something cruel about it, this charade. And yet he couldn’t bring himself to end it.

 _There has to be a way to make this work,_ he thought, before voicing some version of it aloud: “It doesn’t need to be this way.”

“Yes, John, it does,” she told him. “Because I don’t want this.”

He took a long drag from his cigarette. “What if I told you I’m not giving up?”

“I’d tell you that I’ve ‘eard that before,” she said. “And then I’d tell you that you’re a desperate idiot.”

In all the ways John had imagined the end of his and Julia’s involvement—and he’d imagined several—it had never been like this, with him on the receiving end, losing her to nothing and no one, because of an early morning misadventure witnessed by a huddle of groupies and a Polaroid camera. He didn’t know whether to be angry that he hadn’t seen this coming or impressed with her ingenuity, for dumping him with such originality.

“I still love you, Julia,” he said. “Doesn’t that count fer anything?”

“It counts for eight letters. I-L-O-V-E-Y-O-U,” she said. “That’s about it.”

He was furious and he was calm. It was a strange sensation. He felt full of rage, simmering and bubbling just below the surface, and yet the recognition dawned that what was going to happen was already happening and there was nothing he could do to stop it. Like being on a plane with engine failure, plummeting toward the ground. Cool, calm, and furiously fatalistic.

He dragged on his cigarette.

“Every chance I get, I’ll call you,” he said. “I’ll write. Every fuckin’ day.”

“Don’t you dare.”

“And what if I did?”

She was crying. He could hear it in her voice.

“I’ll go to the press myself,” she said. “I’ll expose the whole fuckin’ thing.”

He took another drag from his cigarette. “Do you hate me that much?”

“I don’t hate you…”

“You’re a terrible liar,” he told her.

“…I hate _this_.”

Another puff.

“Then don’t do it,” John said.

“It’s already done, John.”

He waited to hear the click on the other end; when it didn’t come, he disconnected the call himself, dropping the phone onto the cradle with a finality that frightened him.

* * *

Paul awoke slowly, groggily, forgetting where he was for a moment until he heard the soft _chir-r-r-up_ of one of John’s cats as it got up, stretched, and leapt down off of his lap to the floor beside him. He rubbed his eyes and pulled the blanket up around his shoulders again, and caught the scent of John all over the warm fabric. He sighed and inhaled deeply.

John was stretched out on the sofa, his feet crossed at the ankle, a cigarette dangling from between his fingertips. He was facing the TV, still powered, though there was nothing on the screen except the BBC-1 test card, its spinning globe throwing grey light across the carpet; quiet, nondescript elevator jazz hummed from the tinny built-in speakers.

Paul rubbed his eyes, faintly aware of the memory of someone speaking, a phone being hung up. He yawned.

“Who were you talking to just then?”

John brought his hand toward him and knocked the ash off the tip of his cigarette and into the ashtray on his chest. “No one,” he replied, motioning to the TV with the same hand. “It was the close down.”

Paul glanced at his watch; one-fifteen in the morning. BBC-1 never ran past eleven-thirty. _Tell me another one, Lennon_ , Paul thought; he kept his mouth shut, too tired and too sad to call him out on the lie.

“Do you really think she means it?”

John was quiet. He took a drag from his cigarette; Paul watched as the tip glowed. “Don’t know,” John said finally. “Wouldn’t want to speculate.”

The cat who had left Paul’s lap returned—or maybe it was another one; Paul really couldn’t see to tell either way—and began kneading its paws into his thighs. He lifted a hand from beneath the blanket to scratch the top of the purring feline’s head.

“I don’t know why she’s doing this,” Paul said. “It’s not that bad. Nothin’ is going to happen anyway. I bet in a week they forget they saw you two together…”

Paul watched John for a reaction but in the darkness of the room there was little he could see, anyway. He sighed and leaned his head back against the chair.

“Don’t you think she’s been through enough, Paul?” John asked.

Paul scoffed. “You’re the second person to say that to me.”

“Who was the first?”

“George.”

John stubbed out his cigarette and set the ashtray on the floor beside him. “Well, ‘e’s not wrong,” he said. “And as far as any of us should be concerned, if she’s done, she’s done, and we should let it be.”

“Easy for you to say,” Paul replied. “You’ve got Cyn. You’ve got someone to take care of you.”

At this point John turned to look at Paul, awkwardly craning his neck on the sofa in order to meet his eyes. “So have you,” he said. “And if I were you, I’d ask Jane to marry me and I’d never look back.” Then John turned back to the TV wall. “But you don’t really want a wife now, do you? You’ve always wanted a mother.”

The words registered as words to Paul but he didn’t hear them. “Don’t you?” he asked John.

John picked up the ashtray again, the previous butt still smouldering where he’d set it, and lit up another. “Julia was never going to be the one to take care of anyone, and if you can’t see that, mate…”

Somewhere inside the house a clock chimed the half hour. Paul rested uneasily against the seat back while John continued to smoke. At some point, without another word spoken between the two of them, they each fell into dreams.

* * *

JOHN: I did think that would be it, that she’d disappear again just like before and we really would never see her. That’s what I prepared myself for. But that’s not what happened. Brian held up his end of the deal and signed her up to photograph some shows at the theatre he ran, and things went well enough apparently, because Brian extended her contract into the fall. She didn’t work with us though…

* * *

PAUL: I tried to just go on as if nothing had happened. I sent Julia a couple of postcards. I invited her to the movie premiere. She never responded to any of it and I honestly didn’t hear word one from her until early September. ( _Pause_ ) Call it delusion or denial or self-preservation. I don’t know. But I didn’t want to believe it was over, so I didn’t. Simple as that…

* * *

JOHN: It was a little pathetic to watch but it was also remarkable. He was a consummate performer. A natural. He could be Beatle Paul, charming reporters and fans and foreign dignitaries alike, and you’d never know that when the cameras were gone and it was just us, he was pining…

* * *

PAUL: And the summer passed without incident. No fans ever figured out who she was. It felt like the danger had been vastly overblown, and I couldn’t let it go so easily. So I marched right into Brian’s office and told him I was going to see her. I think he would have been very happy had I forgotten about Julia entirely, and he certainly wasn’t very happy with the fact that time and distance hadn’t lessened my feelings for her, but he didn’t tell me I couldn’t do it. It was tacit approval, as far as I was concerned. It meant I could call her up, and if she answered the phone—which she did—it meant I could show up at her door…

* * *

JOHN: Paul made a big show of it. He’d picked up some little souvenir for her from every one of our tour stops that summer, and he put them all in this box and wrapped it up, and he did it in my sunroom, because his place was being renovated and he couldn’t very well do it at the Palais Asher. ( _Pause_ ) I let them be. Paul was staking a claim and I was going to let him have it. It would be easy, I thought. Since I hadn’t seen her in months, and she hadn’t made a single move to contact me either, I really thought it was over…

* * *

PAUL: …But it wasn’t like it was before. Julia wasn’t home much on account of the work she was doing, and when our schedules did line up, she was cold, and distant, you know. Like she’d been back in Liverpool, but worse somehow. And I strongly suspected the reason for her distance was that something had happened between the two of them. But I just had nothing to go on, no proof of anything, just this lingering suspicion. ( _Pause_ ) He had all those songs he was working on…


	39. Friends and Lovers

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: "[In My Life](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zFFQS2G1NQ)"

* * *

JOHN: Paul didn’t really open up to me, not directly. Not about Julia, anyway, but really I wasn’t opening up to him either, so it’s not like it was his fault or he was being cagey. Maybe he was, I don’t know. But it felt like something had changed between us. Shifted. We were still friends, still writing songs together, but the energy was different. I think the tour masked it. It wasn’t until we got back home, when we went up to Liverpool together that autumn, that I realised it…

* * *

11 September 1965  
Liverpool 

_There are place I remember_...

John honestly wasn't sure what he'd been expecting from a visit back home. He'd jumped at the chance when Brian had suggested that they head to Liverpool at the end of the tour, taking advantage of the six week break before they went back into the studio. John had been writing, and writing well; his faraway remembrances of the city of his birth had turned into one song in particular that he was very proud of. Melodic, lyrically important; and he'd written it almost entirely without Paul, which was a strange thing to consider. It was  _his_ song. His and his alone.

So when the memories poured out of him and into the lines he wrote, it was personal. Sure, the song had changed as the finished product came into being. Gone were the specific references, replaced with something more poetic. But the sentiment was the same; he sang the words, in rehearsals and collaborative sessions, and he pictured his youth, the buildings and the streets, the people who populated them. And he'd—perhaps foolishly—expected that he'd be able to come back home and see those places, the pubs and the docks and the buses, all those  _places_ , come to life again. 

But fame had turned them into folk heroes and local legends. There was no respite from it, even in the familiar sights and sounds of their city. He was hemmed in. The crowds were different, and the people respectful of his privacy, a lot more than they were anywhere else. But it was stifling. And it made him so tremendously sad. His song, its lyrics on the tip of his tongue and its melody playing like an advertising jingle on repeat in his ears, was a nostalgic memory and nothing more. It could never be anything more now. 

On that night, instead of joining Paul and George for a meal with Paul's family, John made the pilgrimage to Allerton Cemetery from the front step of his Aunt Mimi’s home, under cover of darkness, with a flask of scotch in his pocket and a paltry bouquet of wildflowers clutched in his hand. He was looking for the only place he knew would make him feel both worse and better at the same time. And he knew where to go without having to be told or needing to look it up. It was a place burned into the muscle memory his legs needed to walk him there, unconsciously, even taking the shortcuts and secret paths that he remembered from his youth in a successful effort to avoid being seen. And when he got there, after hopping the fence and finding the lonely marker, he sniffled against the cold and put the now almost-wilted flowers on the grass stop his mother’s grave.

“‘Ey Mum,” John said quietly. He kicked his toe against a weed growing in the space between her grave and the next one, then bent to pull it up, along with with a few others marring the grass cover. When he finished, he wiped the dirt away from his fingertips, brushing them against his trousers.

He didn’t say anything else for a long time, preferring instead to let the cool September breeze wash over him as he crossed his legs and sat down, pulling the bottle from his pocket and taking a swig before replacing it.

“I wasn’t sure if I’d come, y’know, but I ‘ad to,” he spoke to the wind. “We don’t get up ‘ere that often anymore. I s’pose you know that, though.”

He trained his eyes on the plain marker over her final resting place, sniffled again and leaned his elbows on his knees.

“It’s been a while,” he said. “I’m sorry ‘bout that. Things are busy. We’re tourin’ a lot. Just got back from the good ol’ U-S-of-A. Got to meet Elvis Presley,” he grinned, but it was short-lived. “Not sure it’s what we expected it’d be, though. Not much is these days.” He paused, collecting his thoughts. “But we’re recordin’ too. Writin’ new songs, me an’ Paul. George too. We made another film. Always doin’ something. But that’s the business, y’know. Always going, moving, on to the next big thing.” He sniffled and took another swig from the flask. “I miss it here, though. I miss the privacy. I miss the sounds. London is great, but it’s not home. Not _really_.” He thought about Julia’s mews house, the closest thing he figured any of them had to home anymore, and a pool of warmth settled in his chest, threatening to dislodge the tears he was so successfully holding at bay; it wasn't their place anymore now, and that thought plumbed new depths in his bitterness.

Another sniffle. “But you can’t do much about that, so we make do. We make do.”

He cast his eyes about the cemetery, the stark light of the moon cutting sharp angles around the shadows. When he made the decision to come over to the cemetery that night, he had so much he wanted to talk about: Julian’s recent growth spurt, the house in Weybridge, their next album. Sitting here it seemed inconsequential. There was nothing that was important enough to talk about. He picked at a few more spindly weeds near his feet and tossed the broken plant stems to the side.

“I guess you know what I’ve been up to, though,” he blurted out, and his mind was filled with images of Julia. _His_ Julia. He hadn’t seen her—actually physically seen her—since that morning in June when she’d dropped him off at his gate and he’d slunk into the house to telephone Paul. And the last time he'd heard her voice was the night of Paul's birthday. It felt like a lifetime ago. He shuddered, not from the cold but from the force of her sudden presence in his mind. “I don’t like it. I want her back. But I don’t know what the alternative is. I’ve got no more claim on her than Paul does.”

John laughed a bit at the sudden declaration. “Who would’ve thought, me and McCharmley fallin’ fer the same bird?” he grinned for a moment before letting it pass. “I don’t mean to make light of it, or diminish it, really. Julia—” he paused, feeling a sense of embarrassment rear up inside him. His face burned; it was as if he’d gotten caught sneaking out past curfew. “Yeah, all right, I hear it. But I can’t help that she ‘as yer name.” He sighed. “She’s just a girl. A troubled girl but a good one. Pretty. Creative. Spirited. Ready to spar at the slightest provocation. And I ‘aven’t felt this way about anyone, not even Cyn, or at least not since the beginning with Cyn.” He looked down at his hands. “I know I’m shite at fatherin‘ and bein‘ a husband, but I feel like Julia could’ve made me better, y’know? Like she could inspire greatness in anyone, even a poor shaggin‘ Scouser like me.”

He felt as though his mother would understand all this, were she sitting next to him, but that she’d disapprove of her son’s dalliance, especially since it had come at the expense of the honest relationship he had with Paul, one of a precious few honest things he had in his life. His mother had so loved Paul. He felt his guilt rear up when he thought about that, and tossed a handful of broken blades of grass to the side. “I can ‘ear yer voice in my head tellin’ me it’s not right. It’s not all that great to be hidin’ this from yer best mate. I wanna tell him, but… Christ, Mum, she’s important to me, but I think she’s so much _more_ important to him. It might kill ‘im. It would certainly be the end for _us_.”

He sighed deeply. “I was actually supposed to be meetin’ Paul and George for a bite over at Paul’s dad’s place but I’m sure they’ve already finished. I ‘aven’t been out there yet, to the Wirral. Paul bought him this big house out there a little while back. It’s strange thinkin’ of Jim Mac anywhere but Allerton, but when your son is a big star, you know, and everyone knows your address…”

John trailed off. Looking up at the deep indigo curtain high above his head, he watched for the twinkle in the stars that he sought whenever he needed to know his mother was listening, but the night wasn’t about to give up its secrets so easily; cloud cover obscured most of the bright stars, and the ones that were visible stared back, cold and unfeeling, within their heavenly seats.

John sighed again and ran his hands over the top of the grass covering the grave, trying to focus on the hovering damp cool, the feeling of the taller blades of grass as they tickled his palm. The quiet, the cold, the prospect of another English winter—his ninth without her—on the very near horizon made him so sad to be sitting in this place. He didn’t want to leave her here alone.

With yet another heavy sigh, he let his hand fall down into the grass until he was touching the ground, pressing his hand into it. “I would’ve bought you a big house too, Mum. I promise you, I would’ve…” he said, not wanting to let go of the ground.

Finally, he took another swig from the bottle and capped it before he heard the sound of footsteps crunching over the dry grass. His heart thudded in his chest, thinking first of ghosts and then of cemetery caretakers, not really sure which one he feared more, and finally he sprung up to his feet and faced the sound, only to find Paul striding towards him between headstones.

“Christ Macca!” John swore. “You wanna give me a heart attack?”

Paul came to stand at John’s side and took a look down at Julia Lennon’s grave marker. "Sorry, John," he said.

John studied the younger man for a long moment, wondering how much he’d overheard. If he had heard anything, he wasn’t letting on; his face was contemplative, placid even, and John was sure that if his own confession had reached Paul’s ears, he would be wearing a much different façade, and John’s nose would probably be bloodied.

But that wasn’t the case. Instead, Paul stood beside him, a respectful distance from his friend, and they both stayed there, silent, for a long while. Finally, in one soft, slowly fluid motion, Paul let his arm fall and he placed a single daisy next to John’s wildflowers, then stood back up, shoving his hands in his pockets, his eyes still fixed on her grave. “Figured when you didn’t turn up for dinner that I’d find you here.”

“Hope you told yer dad I’m sorry,” John said. “I just felt…”

“I know,” Paul said.

For a long moment the two men stood in silence, a grave’s width apart. John handed Paul the bottle of scotch but Paul refused, shoving his hands deeper into the pockets of his coat for a moment before reaching out again towards John and snatching the bottle from him before he’d had a chance to put it to his lips. 

“I thought about going up to visit mum tonight meself,” Paul admitted, handing the flask back. “But I can’t do that on my own, you know.”

“‘Fraid of the ghosts, are we?” John teased.

Paul didn’t say anything. “What’d you talk about?”

John shrugged. “Nothin’ special,” he lied. “The mundane details of a mundane life.”

“Yer life is anything but mundane, John,” Paul said.

“It’s not so fuckin’ brilliant, either.”

Maybe it was the alcohol, or the fact that he was within sight of the towering steeples of the church; maybe it was that the confessional nature of his previous conversation had left open to him the option of baring his soul. But the words tumbled out, about the isolation and depression and loneliness, and Paul didn’t laugh or dismiss him, but waited, respectfully, for his friend to continue. And when John didn’t say another word, Paul reached for the bottle sticking out of John’s pocket and took another swig before sitting down.

“It’s not easy,” he said. “There are only four of us who know that, really.”

John resumed his position in the grass, crossing his legs as he sat but keeping his hands folded in his lap instead of wedged against the ground. “I never knew that we’d be strivin’ for _this_ ,” he said. “Can’t breathe without someone takin’ a photo and running it in a paper somewhere… no privacy…”

Paul was silent, thoughtful. He took another drink. “Do you regret it?” he asked, handing back the flask.

John shrugged. “Sometimes. Not really.” He drank. “There are people a lot worse off than us.”

“Right.”

Far off in the woodland surrounding the cemetery came the strange cry of a bird neither of them had heard since their youth. Its familiar cry harkened back to something lost now to them both. As it echoed around the open fields for what felt like miles, in the way that sounds echoed only in Liverpool it seemed, John was hit with the strongest pang of homesickness yet.

“I miss her,” he said.

“I know,” Paul replied. “Julia was something else…”

John snapped his attention to Paul before realizing that Paul was speaking about Julia the Mother, not Julia the Girlfriend, the Mistress, the Side Project they’d both been working on, however unbeknownst to Paul. He exhaled a breath he’d been holding in, playing it off as a sigh.

“I didn’t know yer mum half as well as I should’ve,” Paul admitted, “But I wish I had, you know. She was a fantastic lady.”

“She was.”

“I wonder if our mums would have gotten along,” Paul mused. “Yours and mine.”

“Dunno,” John replied. He thought about it for a moment, imagining the prim and proper Mary McCartney—an image constructed from stories Paul had told him and photos he’d seen lining the piano at 20 Forthlin—sitting in the garden with his own mother, drinking tea. He let out a half-chuckle. “Seems a bit unlikely.”

“Yeah,” Paul said. “But then… you wouldn’t peg us as the type to become friendly either and look where we are?”

John considered. “I suppose,” he said. “But maybe we’re not so different, you and I.”

“You think?”

John took a drink. “I think we’re different enough in the same ways, and somehow that makes us not so different.”

The words didn’t exactly make sense, but John had also been drinking and so the words were bound to be inebriate, and he hoped Paul was feeling the effects too and wouldn’t notice. Alcohol wasn’t his drug of choice—he desperately craved something more, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to take anything more substantial on the visit to his mother’s grave; he couldn’t imagine getting high here in this moment. Because sitting next to Paul McCartney in a dark cemetery in front of his mother’s grave was the most natural thing in the world, and he was the only person John could imagine doing it with. He suddenly wanted to feel it all, without masking anything, withholding nothing.

“I think I understand,” Paul said.

“I’m just talking out my arse,” John said.

“No,” Paul replied. “No, I think I see what you mean. Never thought of it that way. But I see what you mean.”

They passed the bottle back and forth until it was gone, and then Paul produced a cigarette, and they both gave in to the urge for a smoke. They sat in silence, watching the tendrils float from their nostrils and out from between their parted lips, up to the heavens, as their faces lit up in the red glow of the cigarette’s tip every time they inhaled. It reminded John of nights spent with Stu, idly lazing and larking about as young men are wont to do. 

“You’re more than just a bandmate to me, too,” Paul said, as if on cue. “We’ve shared a lot. More than most friends have shared.”

John squirmed, passing it off as discomfort with the way he was sitting. _You don’t know the half of it,_ he thought to himself. He covered his nerves with bluster, taking a drag from the cigarette. “Are you tryin’ to pull me, son? Because I’m a married man…”

Paul laughed, a bit nervously. “I’m just sayin’, is all.”

“No," John needled. "What _are_ you just sayin’?”

Paul took a long drag, exhaling slowly. He picked a piece of cigarette paper off his lip and flicked it away. “That you’re like a brother. Closer than that. You know me better than anyone, even Jane, and I think I know you the same way. And I don’t want that to change.”

John was acutely and painfully aware that the conversation was circling around the selfsame topic he’d been trying to avoid; it made him wonder if Paul really _had_ heard everything he’d said. “Nothin’ll change,” he said. “Not if I can help it.”

Paul nodded. “So you know you can tell me anything.”

 _Shit_ , John thought, feeling his stomach leap into his throat. “What would I have to tell? You probably know it all anyway.”

Paul shook his head. “I don’t know who you wrote ‘This Bird Has Flown’ about, for instance,” he said. “But I think it’s the kind of thing we could—should—probably share with each other.”

John thought about the songs he'd written, wondering why now all of a sudden he was writing so many alone. But he didn't need to think very hard. How much of Julia resided in his lyrics? "Girl", he knew, was obvious; the jealousies of "Run For Your Life" and "This Bird Has Flown" were spurred on by her; even the one at the forefront of his mind on this night, "In My Life", carried her within it, despite his memories of their time together in Liverpool being frustratingly scant, few and far between. 

The fact that Paul was even asking was sign enough to John that he knew more than he was letting on. John steeled himself for a confrontation.

“It’s just a song, Paul.”

“It’s _never_ just a song, John.”

John sighed. “You give me too much credit.”

“And sometimes you don’t give me enough.”

John looked over at Paul, remembering a long-ago conversation on the side of a mountain in the deep darkness of an Austrian winter’s night, when he’d said the same thing to Julia about Paul in an all-too-brief moment of truth that had flickered between them before they’d been swept up in the momentum of the rest of the year. Perhaps _nobody_ was giving Paul enough credit…

There, deep within the bassist’s shadowed and sad eyes, John knew he saw a momentary glimpse of profound understanding. A braver Lennon would have told him, right then; confessed it all and taken it on the chin. But for all the alcohol running through his veins and nicotine in his lungs, he couldn’t muster the courage. Instead, he smiled, changing the subject like flipping a lightswitch.

“Let’s go get into trouble,” he said. “Wake up the old crew, beat down the doors to the Cavern and play a set.” The idea, half-assed as it was, suddenly sounded quite appealing. “The Nerk Twins, limited engagement, one night only.”

Paul smiled and looked down at his hands. “Nah, it’s late. Probably a good idea to get back.”

John shrugged as the moment ended. “Yeh, probably.” He pushed himself up to standing and brushing off the seat of his pants. When he was finished, he leaned down and kissed the top of the cross. “Love you, Julia.”

As he stood up straight again, he wondered what had possessed him to do that, refer to his mother by her first name. But he knew it had caught Paul by surprise, perhaps only because Paul would never have called his mother Mary…

They didn’t talk about it again, but walked together back to the fence, to the place where John had hopped over, and together they made their way back along the roads that had bounded their worlds in their childhood. Roads they now knew they would never walk down the same way ever again.


	40. Knowing She Would

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: "[The Whispers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzm74jVr0Fs)" / "[This Place is a Shelter](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMSDPLOSHyQ)"

* * *

 JOHN: She walked away. I didn’t. Let’s just get that straight. And once I realized that she and Paul were back on—

WILSON: They were?

JOHN: We'd barely landed the fucking plane from America and Paul was over there already. Yeah, they were back on. I had no doubt in my mind. ( _Pause_ ) Look, if you want to look at it as though I were honouring her wishes or something by staying away, fine. That’s a charitable read, but it’s valid, I suppose. Maybe the truth is that I was angry. Maybe I was just too pissed off. Fuck her, you know? You don’t want to stick your neck out and make this work but you'll do it for _him_ , fine then, but then I don’t want to know you either. And that’s fine too. Another valid interpretation.

WILSON: But what do you believe?

JOHN: ( _Long pause_ ) I don’t know. She had Paul, in whatever way that was, and he had her. I'm not a fatalist but... well, maybe I am, because I guess part of me thought that was the way it should be. Paul meets girl. Paul _gets_ girl. End of story. 

WILSON: But that's obviously not the end.

JOHN: ( _chuckle_ ) Of course not. ( _Pause_ ) I just made a choice to let her go. And in order to hold myself to that, I couldn’t see her. It wasn’t  _because_ of her, what she wanted. It was because I knew myself. I knew that if I went back over there, if I called her up, if I let her back in, the dominoes would fall over and that _would_ be the end… ( _Pause_ ) We got a lot of fan mail in those days, as you can probably imagine. We didn’t read all of it but we tried. It would come in to Brian’s office, to the fan club office, sometimes right to the studio, and eventually it would all get forwarded to us. On this night—the very first night we were recording what came to be _Rubber Soul_ —an EMI employee tracked me down to say that there’d been a letter—hand-delivered and addressed to me—and he’d forgotten to send it off with the others that morning to Brian’s, but did I want to take it with me? And I said “Sure.” Because why not? ( _Pause_ ) WHy the fuck not...

* * *

12 October 1965  
EMI Studios, Abbey Road 

Maybe it was the fact that it was delivered as fan mail. Maybe it was because it had been walked up to the front gate. Maybe it was because it had no return address, nothing to indicate where it might have come from.

It didn’t matter. John’s curiosity took hold of him; he had to know what was inside. Never before had the contents of a fan letter intrigued him more. He tore into the envelope and pulled out the small card without thinking, without preparation. When he saw the message scrawled inside, he didn’t _need_ to know anything else.

_“I was wrong.”_

He looked around the studio, as if it were possible he’d see her there; he was suddenly all too acutely aware of how many eyes were in the room with him. Ringo was packing up on one side of the studio; George was wrapping up cords on the other; Paul was up in the booth; engineers, assistants, everyone walking by and walking around and getting too close…

The walls began to close in. John gulped. “When was this delivered?” he asked, his voice thin and quiet.

The man who’d put the envelope in his hand in the first place shook his head. “Sometime this afternoon, I think.”

“Did you see who’d delivered it?”

“No," came the reply. "You’d have to ask one of the front desk girls.”

The man walked away, continuing his evening shut down of the studio, his world evidently still even-keeled. John looked down at the card again.

_“I was wrong.”_

He folded it and put it into his pocket.

“What’s that?”

John turned to see Ringo approaching, rolling up a cord with both hands.

“Nothing,” John replied. “Fan mail.”

Ringo chuckled. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost is why I’m askin’.”

“Nah, just… maybe I need some air.”

Ringo knit his brows together over his nose. “Yeah, maybe… you sure you’re okay?”

John nodded. Truthfully, he wasn’t sure how he felt. Perfectly confused was probably the best way to describe it. But he wasn’t in the mood to hash it out; he excused himself and made his way down towards the back, winding his way towards the garden door, stepping out into the late night that covered the yard in darkness.

In the pale light from behind him, John pulled out the card again and finger-traced the words on the page. _I was wrong_. About what? He checked the envelope again, just to make sure; it was addressed to him. Not Paul. Not someone else. Him. And it was her unmistakably messy, hurried cursive.

_What did this mean?_

“John?”

He spun around, shoving the card back into his pocket. _Your shameful secret,_ he thought, feeling his stomach quiver.

“Oh, Paul."

“You okay? Ringo said—“

“Yeah, fine, just… it’s late, you know, and I’m not—”

“You want a ride home?”

John shook his head. “I’m fine,” he snapped. “Haven’t you got some gallery dedication or nightclub opening to attend?”

Paul brushed off the barb as if it were nothing; John instantly felt shitty for saying it. “I’m just meeting Jane and some of her friends. She won’t mind if I’m fashionably late.”

At this John’s ears perked up. He hadn’t heard Paul talk about Julia in a few weeks; he wondered if anything was still going on between them, as he was certain there had been only a week before, a day before, a fucking minute before. Standing there beneath the stars, John shivered and remember Liverpool; baring his soul in the shadow of a church steeple. _Why does the cover of darkness always make you feel so safe?_  he asked himself.  _Darkness covers all manner of sins and yet it's the one time you want to tell-all..._

He looked at Paul and wondered if his friend felt the same. Or was he lying to him about meeting Jane? 

_What sins are you covering, McCartney?_

“I’ve got my car,” John said. “I’ll drive myself. I’m fine.”

“If you say so.”

The two men stood and looked up at the sky, tilting their heads back almost in unison.

“The song’s good,” Paul said. “It sounds good.”

“Needs some tweaking.”

“Maybe change the key?”

“Maybe," John admitted, both hating and loving the fact that Paul was so on his wavelength; he was, increasingly, the only one who ever was. It was both a blessing and a curse, John realized, to have a person—an autonomous, whole person—existing outside of him but sharing the same thoughts, almost. It was too vulnerable. And yet, the thought of sundering, of parting from him, of not having Paul at his side...

He cleared his throat, pushing the thoughts from his mind. "Yeah, I was thinking about that. Maybe bring it up a bit.”

“Could work. Could work really well.”

“Yeah.”

“Norm says the sitar is difficult. Lots of distortion.”

“What’s his solution?”

John paused. “He could run a limiter on it.”

“But?”

“He doesn’t think it would sound right.”

“I don’t want to get rid of it.”

“We’ll figure it out.”

“That’s what we pay ‘im for.”

Neither one of them looked down from the stars above their heads and for a long moment they were silent. When John finally lowered his head, he felt dizzy, not just from the angle of his head but from the rapid-fire conversational volley between him and Paul, entered into—at least on John’s part—by his desire to avoid the very subject whose words were burning a hole in his pocket as he stood there, three feet away from her first and chosen paramour.

 _I was wrong_.

“Well, if that’s it for the night…”

Paul nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Loads of time left. No need to stay all night on this one.”

John’s stomach flip-flopped. He fingered the edge of the card in his pocket. “Okay then,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Ten thirty?”

John nodded. “Ungodly.”

Paul laughed. “Right.”

John didn’t even bother grabbing his things on his way out the front door, into the courtyard of the building, where he got into his own car and twisted his hands around the steering wheel before keying the ignition and easing out into the road.

Pulling into the mews for the first time since summer filled John with apprehension. He hadn’t paid much attention to whether or not he’d been noticed on the drive over; it was after midnight now, and there was nobody on the streets adjacent to Weymouth Mews at all. But he wasn't wearing his glasses, could barely see at night even with them on, so there was no way of knowing for sure. 

 _This is your dumbest fucking idea_ _yet_ , he scolded himself. Still, he waited, counting to ten, then twenty, then forty, and then he lost count and just sat there, staring out the side window at that blue door.

It could have been a minute; it could have been an hour. No hoards of fans descended on the mews; he didn't have that excuse any longer. The only thing keeping him rooted to the driver's seat was the weight of a single, folded sheet of cardstock against his thigh...

"Fuck..." he whispered. He pushed open the car door, slammed it shut, and tramped over the damp cobbles to her stoop. It was only when he lifted his hand to press the buzzer that the butterflies returned for an altogether different reason. He jammed his finger against the button, once, twice, and then a third time, longer; it rang out within the house, sonorous, buzzing in time with the thrum in his belly.

When she opened the door and saw him there, he thought he might actually throw up.

“What’s this?” he asked, all fake bluster and bravado, holding up the card in his right hand.

“John…”

“Four months, Julia. _Four months_ you go without a single word and then all of a sudden—”

“I needed to think, John—"

“And you’re going with Paul again—I know you are—so what is this? We've been through this. What's changed?”

“I’m not going with Paul.”

“We were through. I honoured that. I didn’t call. I didn’t write. I didn’t intrude. I did what you asked of me, and fuck if it wasn’t the hardest thing, but I fuckin' did it, because that's what you fuckin' asked me to do. And now you call me back, like I’m some dog on a fuckin’ leash and—”

“I’m not going with Paul,” she repeated.

He furrowed his brow, her words not registering. “What?”

“Me and Paul… I don’t know what he’s told you—”

John leaned his hand against the doorframe; he felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach. All the air rushed out of his lungs and his heart, temporarily—he was certain of it (but he was "certain" of a lot of things)—and he struggled to hold himself up on weak and trembling knees. “He hasn’t told me a thing,” he said, taking a breath and softening his tone. “What are you talking about? You and Paul—”

“He comes over once a week, maybe. We play cards. Monopoly,” she told him. “He doesn’t even take off his shoes, John.”

John swallowed against the lump in his throat. “Are you serious?”

Julia held his gaze, and John could see that she was trembling—whether from cold or emotion, he couldn’t rightly say, but even her eyes were shaking, or maybe that was him.

“I’m not with him,” she whispered.

_Sonofabitch._

John hung his head. Julia reached her hand out, touching nervous fingers to John’s chest, then pulling back as if she’d been burned by him. He saw her hand retreating, pausing, then reaching forward again; this time, he clasped her hand in his and stepped forward to meet her, closing the gap between them and pressing both of their hands to the centre of his chest again. His head touched the top of hers; he breathed her in. Beneath him, Julia's relief emptied her.

“I was wrong.”

“About what?”

“Not wanting this,” she said. “Because I do. I want it all.”

John turned his head to press his lips to her hair. “D’you mean that?”

Julia nodded. “Yes,” she whispered. “ _All_ of it.”

John knew what that meant. “Paul?”

After a long pause, she nodded. "I can't... without you... without him..."

He’d have been lying if he’d admitted that it was what he wanted to hear. But with his lips against her forehead, her hand in his, her warmth penetrating his skin, he’d have promised her the moon. Was it really that bad? John loved Paul. He loved Julia, too. He was certain of it. What was the problem with that? _Aren’t you big enough love them both?_ he asked himself. _Are you denying that Julia isn’t big enough to love_ _you_ _both?_

He spun the questions around in his head, over and over, until they landed upside down and backwards and splintered apart into a million tiny pieces. He thought if he concentrated long and hard enough, he could feel her heartbeat beneath her fingertips. That was all that mattered.

John leaned back, looking down his nose at her. “I’ve missed you…”

Solace and comfort took up residence behind Julia’s eyes, there with her tears. She lifted herself up on her tiptoes, and John met her half way, coming down against her mouth with the gentle force of four months of feckless forgetting. Her familiar feel, the softness of her lips as they stacked against his, the sweetness of her taste left on his tongue: it all conspired to send him crashing, sprawling prone against her roots, more willing than ever to worship at her altar.

For this—for moments _exactly like_ _this_ —nothing else mattered.

Not even Paul.

“Invite me in,” he murmured against her mouth.

She shushed the door closed with one hand behind him, cutting them off from the cold dark of the mews, folding them into the privacy of her home.

 _Home_.

It wasn’t a place, John realised. It had never been the mews house, and couldn’t be contained within these four walls. Nothing could contain it.

It was _her_.

* * *

JOHN: The worst thing I could have done was to go over to the mews house when I did. Because nothing I promised Julia was anything I was able to give her and I promised it to her all the same.

WILSON: Why?

JOHN: Because it was night and she was there and we were together. And for a brief and shining moment, everything was perfect...


	41. Choices

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: "[Norwegian Wood](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_V6y1ZCg_8)" / "[Chess Pieces](https://open.spotify.com/album/6aEqN2gKeCfUyjNLBqvRqU)" / "[And the Flowers Were Gray](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDlJqBNiqZg)"

* * *

JOHN: I should have known that what she was asking me for that night—for permission to be less than faithful, to be with Paul at the same time she was with me—was not something I could handle. I know it’s hypocritical of me, but it’s the fucking truth. We spent one night together, and before I knew it, Paul was in the studio with a fucking bounce in his step, and I knew what _that_ meant. He didn't get that way after anyone else. It fucking broke me... 

* * *

PAUL: I found out in late October. We might’ve still been recording for _Rubber Soul_ , if I remember correctly. ( _Pause_ ) No, in fact, I know we were. We’d just finished John’s song, “Norwegian Wood”, which I had always wondered about…  
  
MURPHY: Wondered about it?   
  
PAUL: Well, it was obvious to me that it was about an affair, you know. It wasn’t about his wife. But I just assumed it was someone else—John was always seeing women, actresses and writers, journalists. It was about one of _them_ , I thought. I _never_ thought it was about her. ( _Pause_ ) And yet I think I knew it was all along, as well.

MURPHY: So how did you find out? 

PAUL: Julia was ill that night. I went over to her place with flowers and chicken noodle soup…

* * *

WILSON: So it all fell apart then?

JOHN: Spectacularly. And spectacularly quickly, too… we barely lasted a week.

* * *

22 October 1965  
Kenwood  
Very late night

Headphones on. Tape rolling. Music channelled directly into his auditory canal.

“ _I once had a girl…_ ”

In the darkness of his home studio, John closed his eyes against the rising tide of red that began to flash across his vision. He tapped his foot, unconsciously syncing each nervous bounce to the eighth-notes underpinning the strums of his own guitar. Anxiety in three-four time.

He squeezed his eyes tighter, replaying everything that had led to this moment, trying to trace his racing heartbeat back to its source. Was it taking the tapes from a previous day’s session home, knowing that the story he’d sung was about the one person he couldn’t sing about, desperately wondering if anyone could tell? Maybe it was Paul, arriving late to the studio with a cheeky grin and stories of a mutual friend with bronchitis, and his plan to visit after they wrapped so long as someone could go pick up flowers and takeaway chicken soup so he wouldn’t have to show up empty-handed? Possibly it was the incongruity, the shattering irony, of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Paul and George at a mic, recording intricate vocal harmonies in a song John had written whilst utterly alone?

Or maybe it was his quiet observation of Paul, up in the booth, giving full-throated instruction about exactly how much more treble to add to the guitars, watching him lean over the mixing table from the doorway, hands working, fingers sliding and twisting… manipulating… his body angled over the surface, broad shoulders and slim hips barely visible from John's vantage point on the studio floor, and imagining that same body—his friend’s body, the one that contained the heart and soul of the only person he’d ever let into his world—next to _hers_ , covering _hers_ , fucking _hers_ …

Rage lifted his hand as he slammed the tape off and threw his headphones to the ground at his feet in the darkness of his music room. He rewound the reel, started them playing, turned up the volume. The sound began playing out of the speakers, the headphones having been disconnected from the jack. He turned up the volume, trying to drown out the sound of his own voice inside his head, telling him all the things he didn’t want to know about all the things he knew were happening behind a blue door in central London…

“John!”

He hadn’t heard Cynthia behind him, hadn’t heard her walk in or shout his name twice before, but he heard her that time. He flipped the knob on the volume, turning it down until the song playing from the speakers was barely loud enough to drown out the sound of the spinning reels. Far away in the house, he heard his son crying.

“You’ve woken Julian,” she said.

“Sorry.”

Cynthia surveyed the scene—the ashtray beside the chair, the empty glass next to that, the headphones on the ground, the tapes still spinning their nearly-silent song into the room, his own agitated countenance. John knew she was smart enough to figure out what had happened.

“Not happy with the song?”

He shook his head. “It’s done.”

“Then why are you listening?”

He turned back to look at the reels, listened to his own voice broadcast from the speakers; Paul’s sat in harmony, always higher, always on top.

“ _She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere…_ ”

John wondered if Paul remembered the night a year ago when they’d sat on throw pillows in a room with no furniture listening to records. He wondered if Paul knew that _that night_ was the night they’d been singing about when they recorded this song, the one filling the room right then…

As he dragged his eyes back to the silhouette of his wife standing in the doorway, arms crossed and tired—so tired; John had never seen Cynthia looking as exhausted as she did in that moment—he knew the _real_ question on his mind, the one he’d been wanting to figure out the answer to all evening, had been answered.

 _Of course_ she knew.

He swallowed past the lump in his throat as Cynthia cleared her own.

“Be careful, John,” was all she said. Then she turned and slowly went to check on their child, still crying after being awoken by his father’s musical outburst.

Furious, embarrassed, self-righteous; John balled his hands into fists at his side. Suddenly he knew, deep down, that what had started all of this was not something that happened today, or yesterday, or in the weeks of recording and touring and filming that preceded that…

It was—he _had_ to be honest—within the hour after he’d first set eyes on her, with her short, frizzy hair trapped beneath an unfashionable wool beanie on that hot July day when they’d all sat in Paul’s living room, listening to “In Spite of All the Danger” crackling on the stereo, and he’d watched her, charcoal-frocked, hands clasped around her small box camera as she leaned against the wall behind Pete Shotton, ears turned to the speaker; when he’d first noticed her grey eyes watching him watching her and screwed up the courage to ask her if he could walk her home, only to be met with a slow, shy shake of her head…

When he first knew that he would never be satisfied until the girl who’d introduced herself as Julia in the summer of 1958 was finally _his_.

Before he knew what was happening he found himself in his car, driving dangerously darkened roads, tracing that line back into the city and to the very heart of his problem, all the while knowing full well he’d _never_ be able to get there, not really, not ever again…

* * *

PAUL: It was a lovely night, actually, up until that point. Of course I went right over to Julia’s. We drank tea and played bridge, like we’d been doing up until that week. It was like being old and married, you know? Like a dream come true. So domestic. ( _Pause_ ) I was happy, you know? Truly good and happy. Especially since that week, when she’d opened up to me and we’d become physical again, which was something a month in the making at that point.

MURPHY: How was Julia?

PAUL: ( _Pause_ ) I mean, she was sick. I’m sure she was staying up late on my account, and maybe she shouldn’t have. ( _Pause_ ) Not that she would actually sleep, mind you. Julia always seemed to have the damnedest time with that, especially through the night, for as long as I’d known her. But on this night—morning, I guess. It was very early morning—she’d started to drift off…( _Pause_ ) When I saw John on the front step, you know, I was a little confused. He was upset, but I honestly thought it had something to do with a song or the album or something. I hadn’t seen him that worked up in a long time. It honestly didn’t even clue in for me at first that he was there.

MURPHY: What did he say to you?

* * *

23 October 1965  
Weymouth Mews  
Very early morning…

“Should I get it?” Paul asked, motioning to the door.

“Yeah, how will that play out?” Julia croaked, her voice raw from the coughing that she’d lapsed into as she woke from her brief nap on the couch beneath the window. “You answer the door and there, on the other side, a gaggle o’ girls waitin’ to catch a glimpse of their hero? Brian’d ‘ave my head, you know.” She swung her legs over the edge of the sofa and wrapped her housecoat around her as she trod the few steps from the sitting room to the front door. “ _I’ll_ get the door.”

“We ‘aven’t been found out yet, have we?”

“There but for the grace of God,” she muttered solemnly, hearkening back to their close call that summer as she rounded the corner towards the door.

Paul set about rearranging the cards in the deck. “Another hand then?” he asked. “Or should I put the kettle on and we’ll have another cuppa before bed?”

But Julia didn’t answer. Instead, he heard the door slam shut and Julia coughing as she made her way back to the couch. “Wrong house,” she offered.

Paul watched her face, lined with worry and white as rice paper. He pushed himself up to his feet as the doorbell rang again, diverting his attention for a moment before he returned his gaze to Julia. She dropped her head into her hands, her shoulders up around her ears.

“Who was that?” Paul asked.

Julia smoothed her hands back over her hair and blinked several times, taking a deep breath before continuing. “Nobody, Paul,” she smiled. “Come on, let’s play another hand. I’ll deal!”

But Paul was having none of it. His curiosity got the better of him; he had to know who was knocking on doors in an empty mews at such a late hour. He took the landing in three long strides and gripped the door handle, twisting it roughly in his hand and swinging the old oak open. “Now look, whatever it is yer sellin’—”

He didn’t finish his sentence. John stood there, shivering, on the step.

“What are you doing here?” Paul asked.

“Paul, we’ve got to talk.”

“Now?” he asked. “Is everything okay? What’s happened? Is it Julian?”

He pulled back to peer around the corner at Julia, preparing to ask her to telephone Brian, but what he saw startled him more than John’s presence had. Her face had fallen, aging her ten years in the span of seconds. She closed her eyes and looked away.

Paul looked back at John, who stepped into the entryway, pushing Paul back three steps until the standoff had formed.

“I’ve got to tell him,” John said.

Paul saw that John was looking at Julia.

“John, no—” Julia started, eyes pleading “Please…”

“You’ve got to tell me what?” Paul asked, eyes darting between them. “Julia, what on earth—?

She ignored him; her voice was hoarse. “John.”

Paul heard ringing in his ears. “What’s going on?”

“Julia and me—”

And that was the last thing Paul remembered hearing clearly. As if listening underwater to a conversation on land, Paul picked up words and set them in context—‘affair’, ‘Christmas’, ‘wanted to tell you’. He knew John was talking; he was aware that Julia was still standing next to him because he could feel her there, her warmth and the slight vibration in the air caused by her trembling body. But he lost track of his own senses. The threads of their evening turned gossamer, criss-crossing and needling their way across his vision and blocking out the noise. Paul stood still. His face burned and his hands iced over. He felt his heart in his stomach and his stomach in his throat and he began to quiver.

And the noise came back in, slowly, and the threads pulled away, and everything was clear: John and Julia in front of him and Paul at the edge, the look they gave one another and the way they looked at him. He was keenly aware of their attraction, of their—what could it be?—the physicality that charged the air all of a sudden, of the way he felt about Julia, of the fact that it was suddenly too hot in the house and the shoes he wore on his feet were at least half a size too small and squeezing his toes unbearably tightly. As he sank to the chair against the entry hall wall, air returned to his lungs and his solar plexus cracked and he felt as though, if he exhaled right then, shards of him would fly out with his breath.

“How long?” he asked.

“Since Christmas.”

“Last Christmas?”

Nobody answered.

“How many times?” No, he didn’t really want to know that. But he asked anyway. He didn’t want to cry, but he felt he might and he shamefully turned his face before they could answer.

“Paul,” Julia whispered.

“Look, Paul, it happened,” John said, sounding resigned rather than indignant. “It happened, and that’s all there is to it. You can punch me and get it out o’ your system, or you can go on draggin’ this out until the end of time. It’s up to you.”

“Don’t fight,” Julia said, her voice quiet by necessity of her ravaged throat.

Paul scoffed at her words as he brought his face up from staring at the floor; John seemed surprised by them too. They both knew it had been nothing but one long fight since… well, since _when_?

He didn’t honestly want an answer to that question.

“I don’t know what to say,” he managed, his voice small and straining from the squeezed-shut hole where his throat used to be. He stared at the floor, the polished hardwood beneath his feet, squeezed into his too-small shoes. A tear rolled forward onto his bottom lash, and he watched as it fell down and splashed there just beyond the reach of his left toe. He couldn’t take his eyes off it, this puddle spilled from his eye. He hated that he’d cried; he hated that he was crying over a girl, and that the pain had been caused not only by her but by his best friend. He hated himself for missing it, the clues, because now that he looked back, he saw hundreds of them.

In one swift motion, he squished the toe of his boot against the teardrop, destroying it. “Well you’ll just ‘ave to choose.”

“Choose?” Julia was incredulous.

John looked at Paul, and Paul looked at John. He remembered the stairwell, the night in 1961 when they’d first argued over her, when they’d beaten each other senseless in order to win her and she’d chosen neither of them. Now, steeling themselves against her, they seemed in agreement. Resolved. They wanted her to choose. They  _needed_ her to choose.

“Yes. Choose,” Paul repeated. “You didn’t last time and look where that got us. I’m not ‘aving it again.”

“I can’t choose,” her lips moved, but no sound came out. She leaned her head against the wall and closed her eyes. And Paul began to panic. What if she chose John? What would he do? He wished he hadn’t suggested it. He wished he hadn’t come over at all.

But Julia breathed, in and out, and her eyes squeezed closed and her face turned red and she shook and finally exploded. “Choose?” she cried. “When will one of _you_ fuckin’ choose, eh? When will one of _you_ choose _me_ and—”

Her voice cracked on the last word and she fell into a fit of coughing that left Paul in pain just watching her. As her face reddened and she clutched the wall to hold herself up, both he and John stepped to her side. But she shrugged them off, pushing her way into the kitchen, where she coughed and hacked so hard she vomited into the sink.

“Julia?” Paul asked. She didn’t respond immediately, and worry rose within him. He watched her lean against the sink, running the tap and rinsing her sick away. Finally, she shut off the water, leaned down against her arms, and was still.

They stood and they breathed and they filled the space with their thoughts for a long while, not sure what to do next. Paul wished John hadn’t said anything, and somehow wished he’d said it earlier. He didn’t know what John thought; his tawny hair shaded his eyes from view and his arms were crossed, non-committal, across his chest. Paul couldn’t even tell if he was looking at Julia or the floor. But he looked tired; John had looked tired for months, and maybe now Paul knew why. He wondered at once what he was so upset about; it seemed forgotten to him. All he wanted was his best friend back, and Julia.

He wanted them both.

Julia’s movement as she pushed herself up from the counter and made her way back towards them brought Paul back to the moment. She was muttering to herself, shaking her head, moving her hands.

“Julia?”

She turned to look at him, casting her eyes back and forth between John and Paul. “You can’t imagine what this is like fer me. Fallin’ in love with two men at the same time…” she said, labouring to inhale; Paul winced at the wet rattling sound of congestion with each breath she took. Splotches of red ringed her nose from sneezing and her eyes from crying. He hadn’t noticed that she’d been crying until that moment. He wondered what it meant that that particular detail had been lost on him.

As if in a trance, Julia walked between them, past them, into the living room beyond, where she collapsed onto the sofa. She leaned her head back against the cushions and covered her face with her hands as she sobbed, openly, for several seconds. “I’m so fuckin’ tired,” she whispered at last. When she pulled her hands away from her face, her eyes were shut.

“What are we doing here?” Paul asked shortly after. He wasn’t really addressing anyone, not in particular. It was just a question that he felt needed to be spoken, so he’d spoken it, softly, haltingly. He imagined his words, pregnant with meaning and filling the spaces between and around them, like melted butter over hot toast. Not one inch of the room wasn’t touched by it, this question, those words. He looked up as Julia stirred, frowned, and sighed.

“I’m sorry,” she mouthed, her voice a notch above a whisper. Paul’s eyes returned to the floor. His resignation was surprising. He felt no jealousy. But it wasn’t a lack of jealousy borne out of indifference: no. Paul didn’t care about Julia’s infidelity because a part of him had already forgiven her.

Paul found her a blanket; John turned out the lights for her to sleep in peace. Too worn out to fight, they made themselves at home instead. Each acknowledged that the other knew just as much about Julia’s home as he did; neither of them were surprised when they both went for the same cupboard on the second floor to find blankets and extra pillows, or that they both knew which shelf held mugs in the kitchen. They didn’t speak a word to each other until hours had passed and the tea they’d made together in silence was cold and the radiators came on for the first time since the winter before.

Deep silence stretched between them. Far away, outside, they heard sirens; a night bird Paul couldn’t identify sang its song. He imagined it perched on the eaves of the house across the lane. A blackbird, perhaps, or a nightingale. He listened to its song, this bird, before it flew away. Fixing his eyes on a gleaming point in the darkness—he thought it was John’s wristwatch clasp but it could have been the base of the lamp or a glass on the table or a million other shiny things scattered about the room—he cleared his throat.

“Now what?”

A pause, a stirring; Julia shifted and coughed and they waited for the sound to die before they dared continue. John replied, his voice barely above a whisper: “I love her, too, Paul.”

Paul sighed, deeply, concentrating on the feel of his rib cage expanding with his lungs as they filled with air, because he didn’t want to feel the ache everywhere else. It was a confession, the last bit of the fabrication of the last ten months exposed, out on the table, all of it, for them to jaw over.

He wasn’t mad. He already knew he wasn’t jealous. He was hurt, but it didn’t feel justified. He imagined this would be what Jane would feel like if she knew, and that put it in perspective for him. He was _supposed_ to feel like this, he knew that. He didn’t deserve to ask for it to end.

“I think I knew that already,” he replied, remembering the way John had looked at Julia from the doorway of his bedroom at 20 Forthlin on the night she’d laid herself bare and vulnerable at his feet, looking to him for help from the most unimaginable horrors that had befallen her. He hadn’t thought about that moment in so long it seemed as if it had occurred in another life. _It was another life_ , Paul thought then. _A pre-fame life, a life that you’ll never get back._

He looked at Julia.

 _A life that keeps intruding nonetheless_ …

“Yeah,” he continued. “I think I’ve known that for a long time.”

It seemed the right thing to say. John took it and didn’t ask for more. It wasn’t perfect, this delicate truce, the tacit agreement to postpone the battle. But it felt respectful.  As long as they both loved her, the last gossamer thread of that evening would link them together, whether they wanted it to or not.

* * *

PAUL: Her question was warranted—why _hadn’t_ we chosen her? We didn’t address it then, but it never left my mind. We’d never made her the priority, except insofar as our own needs, fulfilled by her, were concerned. And it made me wonder—if I’d not taken George’s advice, if I’d proposed to her when I bought that ring, if I’d broken it off with Jane earlier… ( _Pause_ ) But I didn’t. I didn’t make that choice. I was a coward. We both were. And I don’t know what it says about any of us that she called us out on it and nothing—not a thing—changed between us…


	42. Like a Woman, Like a Little Girl

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: This chapter contains mention of sexual assault and violence.

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: "[Their Memories](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkWwQlqpFYM)"

* * *

JOHN: There was this understanding. It never needed to be spoken—we all agreed that it would work best this way. We just rolled with it. I knew if Paul said he was “going out” it meant he was going with her, and I think he knew the same. We never made plans more than a couple of days in advance. But it was fine. I didn’t hate it. I was glad it was out in the open, such as it was.

WILSON: And Paul?

JOHN: I think he felt the same. It was good. Our work didn’t suffer. We were getting more creative and working together was proving more fruitful than I think we’d anticipated. We’d be recording late into the night—past midnight, a lot of the time. But it helped, you know, to fall into work like that. I’m sure it wasn’t healthy to avoid it, but in my opinion the way we worked around it was better than not having her at all. She was like water to me. You need water to survive, right? Well I needed Julia to survive. ( _Pause_ ) But you can’t hold water forever, you know? Too tightly and it finds a crack to seep out; too loose and it runs away. If you close your hand over it, your skin wrinkles; if you leave your palm open, it evaporates. There’s no way around it unless you keep it bottled up, and I couldn't bottle her up…

WILSON: So this continued until—?

JOHN: December. A little over two months, and almost a year to the day that she first came up to my place in Surrey.

WILSON: What happened then?

JOHN: ( _Pause_ ) You know, she came so close to telling me everything—not just hinting at it, but actually telling me, in detail—everything that had happened with her step-dad the night he was attacked. I never made her tell me, and I always figured she just never needed to tell me, either. I didn’t need to know more than the fact that _something_ had happened. I was content to leave it at that. But when the police came looking for her again…

* * *

23 December 1965  
Weymouth Mews 

Under cover of darkness—always under cover of darkness—John had stolen away from the car, parked at the far end of the mews where there was enough space and shadow to leave it for a while, and hurried along uneven cobblestones until he’d reached her blue door. She’d thrown it open and welcomed him in, and he had barely enough time to toe off his shoes or shrug off his jacket before they were tripping over things and over sounds and over each other, tearing at buttons and zippers like restraints from which they desperately needed to be free.

Words were left half-uttered as they consumed one another in the glow of Julia’s plain and virtually unadorned Christmas tree, at the end of a trail of clothes that started behind the closed door where John’s shoes were still bleeding puddles of meltwater across the floor. It was as though it had been months instead of just days since the last time they’d been there.

It was a carefully orchestrated dance, performed to studied perfection.

And when they were done, sweat standing up on their shoulders and dampening strands of hair that stuck to their foreheads and the backs of their necks, they collapsed, heaving, beneath the tree boughs. Julia shivered, and John pulled his coat, draped over a nearby footstool, around them both.

Thus, for John and Julia, the fall of 1965 bled into winter. Nothing had been spoken; it was an arrangement of convenience, made easier if no one acknowledged it directly. They—he and Paul and Julia—had fallen into step together as though it were the most natural thing in the world, to trade off days with each other. It felt as though it could go on like this forever.

But that was the part that troubled John now as Julia curled up next to him on the floor of the house he’d taken to calling his second home— _no_ , John corrected. _She’s the home_ —because h e never once before asked her if it bothered her that so much of their relationship had been conducted in secret. He'd taken it as a given that, yes, of course, it wasn’t ideal. Part of him wondered if she’d ever felt it was a fair trade off, especially now: _Yes, even you can have an illicit affair with not_ _one_ _but_ _two_ _Beatles, but you can’t tell a soul and it has to be kept the deepest of secrets, and we can never leave your house, so I hope you like where you live…_

He was fine with it. If it wasn’t with Julia, it would have been with someone else. And of course there _had_ been others: girls brought up to hotel rooms and dressing rooms, backstage, before and after the shows, in Copenhagen and Melbourne, showgirls in Las Vegas and French girls in Montreal, and everywhere in between. Not to mention the girls here, met in clubs and parties and fucked in bathrooms and parked cars. Always the same arrangements, the sneaking around, the carefully-worded instructions to keep things quiet when all was said and done. In principle, it wasn’t all that different now.

But if he were being honest with himself, he knew it was different this time. Because Julia was a friend. A good friend; a _before_ friend. And she let him coexist with her not because he was John Lennon the Beatle but because he was John Lennon from Liverpool and she’d known him when he was just a scoundrel, a liar and a cheat, when he had nothing to his name. And yet, in spite of it all, she still kissed him like she meant it.

He repaid that by sharing her with his best friend, without asking if she was okay with it.

Without even really asking _himself_ if he was okay with it.

Was _this_ what she meant when she said she wanted it all?

John looked around the room at the bright, new ornaments and decorations Julia had purchased but not yet hung on the tree. Some of them had come from John, bought as gifts which he’d had delivered to her home in the weeks leading up to Christmas. The things he didn’t recognise—the wreath on the door, or the tree skirt on which her presents sat—gave him pause as he wondered who they’d come from, whether she'd purchased them herself or had been given them by someone else. It didn’t matter, except that it _did_ matter, and that’s what bothered him: his possession of Julia was never going to be as long as other men’s things filled her life. He wanted so badly to do better by her, to show her he was worth the trouble it took to be there with him now, and to want him to be the _only_ one.

In a rare show of tenderness, he pulled her tighter to his side, nakedly warm down the length of him, and buried his face in the side of her neck.

“What are you doin’?” she giggled, leaning away from him.

“Gargling your hair,” he teased, nipping at her earlobe.

She threw her head back in a laugh, exposing the long line of her throat to his eager and searching mouth, the anxiety of the previous moment forgotten.

“Stop,” her meek protests met his ears.

“Go.”

“I’m warnin’ yeh, Mister Lennon.”

“And I’ll be wearin’ yeh, Miss Fitz…” he continued to nuzzle the side of her neck as he positioned himself above her, kneeing her thighs apart. “If the Fitz fits…”

Julia shimmied out of John’s grasp, scooting down next to him until they were eye to eye. She leaned up into him, kissing him squarely on the mouth. But rather than being an opening to the next sentence, it was instead final punctuation, a full stop; John could tell by the firm intransigence of her lips against his that she was not going to yield to him the way he’d hoped she would.

“Let’s have a drink first,” she whispered, and just as quickly as she’d moved to meet him she squirrelled away again, pushing herself up and to her feet, moving like ink in water. John groaned heavily, his eyes on her backside as she threw his shirt on and padded her way into the kitchen, clanging cupboards and clinking ice once she got there.

Heavy footsteps and voices on the stoop, then banging at the door, broke the moment. John scrambled to sit up.

“Christ what if it’s the girls?” Julia asked, her eyes wide as she slunk back against the wall, away from the tiny window above the sink that looked out into the mews.

John didn’t seriously entertain the notion but it was plain to see that Julia—who had, at this point, spent nearly six months in the employ of Brian Epstein’s NEMS Enterprises, and had seen firsthand and as up-close-and-personal as any civilian had been how crazy it was in the eye of that particular hurricane, even though she wasn’t working in any serious capacity with the four of them—most expressly did entertain it. In her mind, a thousand rabid Beatles fans were pouring into Weymouth Mews in that very moment. If it hadn’t alarmed John so much to have their moment of post-coital peace interrupted, he would have thought her reaction quaint and charming.

“It’s not,” he said.

Julia pressed a hand to her mouth and her cheeks, quelling the fire of embarrassment, and pulled John’s shirt closed over her breasts. She reached for her glass on the counter.

“Just don’t answer it,” John offered.

Julia gestured to the window. “The lights are on,” she said. “You can see it, plain as day, that someone is home.”

John furrowed his brow. “Who’s callin’ ‘round to a mews house at this hour, though?” he asked. “I’d tell ‘em to bugger off.”

Julia chewed her fingernail. “I don’t know what to do.”

John brushed hair off her forehead. “I could call Mal.”

“It would take him too long to get here.”

“Then just ask who it is first,” he said.

Julia mulled it over, closing her eyes for a moment as she thought. A second set of knocks intruded then. Julia gasped, leaping into action like a spooked cat; she stepped to the entry hall.

“Who is it?” she called.

“Metro Police,” came the voice on the other side.

John’s eyes widened with surprise as his first instinct—to tease her—blossomed. “Naughty girl with coppers at ‘er door,” he grinned, putting on a voice. “What has she done now?”

She waved him off, still too startled to joke. “Go upstairs,” she hissed, fastening all but the top two buttons on his shirt. It hung on her thin frame, draping down to her upper-thigh, obviously far too big for the petite frame drowning in it. She grabbed her panties and threw them on next, tugging at the hem of the shirt to cover more of her body than it possibly could before changing her mind and grabbing her leggings in a hurry.

“Just a moment!” she said to the door, turning back to John. “Go!” she urged him again. “No one can see you here.”

He did as he was told, throwing on his underwear and grabbing his trousers and as many other items of his own clothing as he could find on the way before treading quietly against the floorboards and up the stairs to the landing outside her first floor studio. Then he crouched down low around the corner where the stairs doubled back and waited, breathless, for whatever was going to happen downstairs to happen.

There was no point trying to listen; the hushed sounds of their voices died in the space between the foyer and the stairwell, and all he could make out were muted whispers, bits of phrases. He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes, shivering in the draft.

It seemed like seconds later that the sound of the door opening and _shushing_ shut brought him back to reality. He got to his feet and peered down the stairs, in the general direction of the door.

“What was that about?” he asked.

His shirt sleeves were sloppily rolled to her elbows; the leggings she wore were crooked, one leg pulled up higher than the other. Her loose ponytail had already started to fall out, throwing wayward strands of hair into her face. She looked at the ground and not at him, sagged against the wall.

“Is everything okay?”

She sighed deeply, seeming even smaller than before as she wrung her voice from her throat. Her voice sat thick and rounded over the words that tumbled from her lips, lips that clung like frost to the mask she wore, as if a single warm breath might melt them off and leave her exposed. “They asked me if I knew where Julia Fitzpatrick was.”

It was a daft answer, he realised; it wasn’t even an answer to the question he’d asked. He didn’t understand the relevance. “Well what did you say?”

She shook her head. “That I’ve never heard of her before.”

John laughed. “Well I’ll be… Julia Fitzpatrick, lyin’ to the Met…”

Julia shrugged. “They found my name in the Land Registry office,” she said, frowning, her brows knit together over her nose as she shook her head. “You know, I tried so hard to be quiet and not bring attention to myself when I got here, but now the house is in my name so they were able to find me… stupid, Julia… you let him buy you a house...”

She started to talk but John quickly realised she wasn’t necessarily talking to him; her jumble of phrases and words ran together, quickening in places and slowing down in others, seemingly at random, started out like an epiphany—a realization of all the mistakes she’d made—and morphed into a confession before turning interrogative as she began to blame herself for the sudden misfortune that had seemingly enveloped her.

John watched her, tried to follow her line of thought, but didn’t know what to say.

“Maybe I had it good for a while. But now I’ve got nothin’. And they think I’m her, that I’m still that girl, and they want to talk to her about what ‘appened—they think they know who I am and I’m _not_ . I’m  _not_ her anymore!” She was shaking, violent tremors coursing through her from head to toe. “They couldn’t possibly know…”

John was baffled. “Julia, yer not makin’ any sense—?”

Julia brushed her hand through the air and reached for the table nearest the door where her half-empty glass stood. She swallowed its contents in a single gulp. “I’m not going back there. Whether they believe me or not, I’m not going back.”

She stalked into the kitchen and fixed herself another drink, muttering the entire way. He watched as she filled it, drank it down, and filled it again.

“Julia—”

“Because I know what they’re here for. I know what they think happened that night… twentieth of February, nineteen hundred and sixty two…”

“February twentieth?” John asked. “Sixty-two?”

She looked up at him, and with the way the light bounced around the starkly painted kitchen and the manner with which she held her head—her jaw jutting out, exposing the thin silver scar along the side—John clued in. _February 20th, 1962_ , he remembered all of a sudden. _The night she showed up on Paul’s step… hurt... bloodied…_

“Julia… that was the night—?”

She downed the glass in her hand, turned around, went to fill it again.

John stepped into the fray, seizing her by the arm, preventing her from grabbing the liquor bottle. “Julia… what happened that night?” he asked. “Was it something with yer stepdad?”

Her eyes darkened, flashing with a mixture of fear and fire at the mention of his name. He readjusted his grip on her upper arms.

“Did something happen to him? Is that why they came here lookin’ for you?” he demanded. “Because the last time the police showed up at the door looking fer you, it was because of some attack on yer step dad…”

For a long moment she stared up at him but without _really_ looking at him. Her hardened gaze slowly began to liquefy, clouding over with drink and tears. She squirmed out of his grasp and brought the glass in her hands up to her lips; he took it from her, holding it behind his back.

Slowly she shook her head. “Julia Fitzpatrick is listed as next of kin and is also a person of interest, but they won’t find ‘er ‘ere, I can tell you that.” She swayed on her feet. “They think I was the one who bashed his head in.”

John remembered the sight of the blood on her shirt, folded up in the corner of Paul’s room all those years ago. So much blood, and none of it from her. He swallowed. “Did you?”

Julia levelled a glance at him, steadying herself as much as she could, virtually toe-to-toe with him on the cheap linoleum floor of her kitchen. “Do _you_ think I did?”

He was suddenly not sure about anything. “I don’t know what you did,” he said, his voice hard and quiet, deliberately stony, as he tried to be strong in his convictions and felt himself coming up short. “I don’t care.”

But Julia was off again. “If he’d laid a hand on me just one more time. _One more time…_ ” She stepped back from him, her bare feet slapping against the cold floor. “I didn’t have to call a doctor… I could’ve let ‘im bleed to death right there in the fuckin' gutter. It's more than 'e deserved…”

Her focus wavered, stuck somewhere behind John, over his left shoulder, in the middle distance of her long house. Her eyes watered, clouding over even as he watched her struggle to maintain her composure. She was shaking, wincing, at whatever she was remembering. After a long moment, she turned back to the sink, bracing herself against the counter as she threw up in the basin. John scowled but stepped forward, ready to offer a hand.

“Don’t,” she urged, her voice thick and cloudy, in between retches. She ran the tap, rinsed out the porcelain, and splashed some water on her mouth, her head still hanging low over the sink.

“You shouldn’t drink so much.”

She scoffed. “Yeah, that’s it.” She turned around then, staring him straight in the eye. It was startling, how icy her eyes had turned, how crisply-defined her grey irises had become as she hardened and stood up straighter, her mouth set firm, an unbroken line across her face.

John fumed. “I wish I’d broken the bastard’s neck when I ‘ad the chance.”

Julia seemed amused and for the first time all night she laughed from deep in her belly. “What do you mean, John?” she snorted.

“I mean I should’ve killed ‘im," he said. "That night when I saw 'im with you."

“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”

“Come on, Julia,” he said. “After what he did to you…”

She stared at him, incredulous. “You don’t know what happened to me.”

He took the bait and ran with it. “Yeah, actually, I think I do.”

She scoffed. “Well, I’d be thrilled t’ ‘ear your report. See, I don’t really remember every time because I'd fly away when he came into my room at night. I'd fly away in my mind and then I wouldn't have to be there to see him hoverin' over me like a fuckin' storm cloud, so I didn't have to feel his hands on me, or feel anything he did to me. And I’d wake up the next day all sore and feelin’ sick and he’d let me ‘ave it with his belt or a shoe, callin’ me a whore and sayin’ ‘e was gonna kick me out if I didn't smarten up. Did you know that part? Is this old news to you?”

John bristled. “Oh fuck off,” he said.

“Fuck off? Really? Oh but there’s so much more. ‘Cause he kept apologizin’ and tellin’ me he couldn’t help it, and I fuckin’ believed ‘im, even while it was ‘appening. ‘E’d buy me nice things and take me on trips with money I knew ‘e didn’t have, to Manchester or to Blackpool. But it always ended the way it started: with him sneakin’ into me room—”

John shook his head and walked away.

“Come on, John. I thought you knew all this.”

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” he said, uncrumpling his undershirt and throwing it over his head while he searched for his socks. John was nearing the end of his tether. He needed a break, to take a breather, to step away from it or else he would explode.

“Why not?” she followed him into the living room. “Why don’t you wanna ‘ear about the time I thought he got me pregnant? I was fourteen, John. Fourteen! It was the same week as my mother’s fucking funeral.”

John’s eyes snapped to hers. _That_ had gotten his attention.

She continued. “Or what about the first time he brought ‘is mate from down the pub ‘round to ‘ave a go? That started happening around the time I first met you, Lennon. I was fifteen fuckin’ years old. This pal of ‘is hurt me so badly I couldn’t walk the next day, did you know that? When the bastards didn’t pay up, Dick beat _me_. I had a lock on my door until nineteen sixty one. He used to lock me in my room. Do you know why he did that, John? Do you? You know everything, so you must know that.” She stood a few feet behind him, raising her voice to epic pitch. “You know fuckin’ all.”

He spun around then, frustrated and angry at his inability to fix what was happening or stop it from continuing. A deep-seated, inborn instinct saw John lift his shoulder, almost imperceptibly, as he readied to strike her, just to stop her from talking, from saying the horrible things she was saying, the things he never wanted to hear and didn’t want to imagine.

But he was met by another, even deeper instinct, as Julia cowered in silence, covering her face with her hands as she stepped back into the wall behind her and knocked a box of glass Christmas ornaments off the table. They shattered, scattering across the floor, tiny shards of glass reflecting the light of the tree where they spilled.

Shaken from his stupor, John forgot the anger that had lifted his hand; in the sudden silence, he replayed the scene and realised the scope of his actions and their consequences.

“Julia—”

She wept into her hands, still closed over her face, and slid down to sit against the wall. John trod across the floor, slow and careful, avoiding the glass that seemed to have shot out everywhere. He gained her side and knelt down, a respectful few feet away from her.

“Christ, Julia, I’m—” but he shook his head; ‘Sorry’ just didn’t cut it.

She gulped down heaving breaths and shook with the force of her silent sobs. “You would‘ve been perfectly within yer right to backhand me,” she told him in a voice softened by adrenaline, quavering with fear.

“I wouldn’t’ve,” he lied, leaning over to kiss the top of her head. His guilt was so overwhelming because deep down he knew he was not only capable of it but had been seconds away from actually doing it. He breathed into her hair, smelling himself on his shirt wrapped around her delicate shoulders.

She sighed and leaned into him. “Sometimes I wish you would, though," she said. "I could hate you then. It would be so much easier if I hated you.”

John shook his head. “It doesn’t have to be like this,” he said.

She sniffled. “What d’you mean?”

“We could go away. Far away."

“What?”

John could scarcely believe his own ears. “I’m serious. Run away with me. We can charter a plane and fly to Bermuda, or Australia, or Newfoundland. I don’t care.” He let her go and reached between them to grasp her hands in his. “Run away with me. Marry me, Julia.”

“But John,” she said, pushing herself away so she could look at his face. “What about Cynthia? And Julian?”

“I’ll figure it out.”

“What about Paul?” she said, her lips popping as she formed the ‘P’ in his name.

John bristled. “What about him?”

She shrugged. “You ‘ave a band to think of.”

“Julia, I’m serious. More serious than I’ve ever been,” he sighed. “I’m in love with you.”

His confession seemed to do little to affect her. She shook her head. “You _think_ you are, but—”

“Julia, I love you. Doesn’t that mean anything?”

She sighed and wiped her eyes. “These last few months—”

“Forget that,” he said. “If we went through with this, it would be the end of the hiding. The end of all o’ this. We could go out t’ dinner, go dancing’. I could take you to movie premieres,” he gripped her arms in his. “You would never have to worry about money. We could have a house in the country. We could farm sheep. We could even live _here_ , I don’t care.”

“Don’t be daft,” she scolded.

He thought it was the most clever idea he’d had in months. He wasn’t about to let it go that easily. “I’m serious, Julia. I’ll open up any store you want. Right now,” he motioned to the phone on the stand in the hall. “One phone call. I’ll have them open up Harrods. You can have your pick, any ring, from any jewelry counter in the city. It’s yours. It’s all yours.”

She shook her head. “You were once this cocky kid, picking fights with the Teddy Boys on the docks, and now you’re talking about shutting down _Harrods Department Store_ for a ring?”

“For you, Julia,” he said.

She shrugged. “What makes you think this is what I want? What makes you think this is what _you_ want?" She shook her head. "You forget so quickly. Why in the world would you jump from one marriage to another when anyone can plainly see it’s the last thing you want?” Her voice sounded strangled. “All you see when you look at me is someone you want to save. I don’t need John Lennon to save me.”

“You don’t know what I want.”

“It’s written all over your face.”

John fumed. “Well then can’t you see that it’s you? That what I want is _you_ ? That _all I've ever wanted_ is you?”

Julia looked up at him, but her eyes revealed nothing. “No John. You want the _idea_ of me.” She sniffled, adding in a voice as soft as down: “The me you want doesn’t exist anymore, anyway.”

She stood up then, sighing as she looked at the mess all around her. The first thing she did was unbutton his shirt she was wearing, turning away in modesty as she leaned over to pick up her own shirt from the pile where it had landed earlier. She pulled it down over her head and tossed his to him, and he stood there, holding it, unable to figure out what to do. He watched as she gathered her hair again into another high, messy ponytail and smoothed her hands over her own blouse, then took a step away from the wall and turned into the hallway towards the kitchen, muttering about her broom with the broken dustpan, wondering where she’d put it.

He shook his head in confusion. Taking his shirt by the collar, he shook it out and pulled his arms through the sleeves. As he started buttoning it up, John noticed the blood on the floor: a dark pool where Julia had been standing and smearing into her footprints leading to the kitchen.

“Julia,” he said, “Are you bleeding?”

Julia stopped in the entryway, holding out her arms to examine them for lacerations. She turned them over, scanning from wrist to elbow. “No,” she said with a shake of her head.

John motioned to the floor. “Your foot.”

Julia looked down, slowly, and then lifted her head again. Nothing registered on her face. “Oh.”

He had no idea there was room for him to be shocked further by her behaviour; her nonchalance was challenging that. He ordered her to sit and swept his hand over the floor, collecting the pieces and shooing them into a corner. Without thinking, he grabbed a pile of tea towels out of a shopping bag on the door, price tags still dangling from threaded loops sewn into the corners. He tore two away and returned to Julia, who had her foot perched on the opposite knee, examining her sole.

“I don’t know how it happened,” she said flatly.

He knelt in front of her and put a towel on the floor. He had never liked the sight of blood— _Who does_? he wondered—but the idea of fishing a shard of glass out of Julia’s flesh was sending waves of nausea coursing through his body. He steeled himself and gently cradled her heel in his hand. “Can I ‘ave a look, then?”

“Oh, don’t use those. They’re new,” she admonished him.

He ignored her, using the cloth to clean blood away from around the piece of green glass he could clearly see sticking out of her foot. It was large, an inch long, right below the ball of her foot and jutting out diagonally across her arch. It protruded enough that even his thick and calloused guitarist’s fingers could find purchase and pull it out with relative ease. It came out clean, and he tossed it towards the pile, then pressed the towel in his hand to the bottom of her foot and held it there.

“You okay?”

“It’s too bad,” she said. “That was my favourite colour ornament.”

John moved into her sightline, making sure he had eye contact. “Julia, does it hurt?”

She shook her head, looking at the dried blood on her skin and the fresh, crimson stain in the towel still pressed underfoot. With a sigh, she shook her head, fingering a loose hem of the towel. “Ruined, too.”

John was at a loss. Sure, she’d been drinking when he arrived, and he had just watched her polish off how-many-more drinks in quick succession, but surely that wasn’t enough to dull her senses to this degree. And even though the glass was large and the cut fairly deep, she hadn’t lost enough blood to render her so oblivious to the pain. He was baffled.

“I should call a doctor,” he said.

“Mm,” she replied.

He took her hands and applied them to the towel, instructing her to hold it tightly and not let go. Then he started to place the call.

“Let me talk,” she said. “They can’t know you’re here.”

It hadn’t even been a concern for him, though it should have been, and John felt stupid for making another rookie gaffe; he nodded and handed her the receiver from the telephone on the table beside her and waited.

“Ah yes, hello,” she said, her voice suddenly full of life, with no trace of Liverpool in her words. _She’s so good at this, at the put on_ , John thought. It pained him to see her wear such different identities like this, knowing that years of practice had made her a pro. _Someone with men lined up to take her on dates, willing to pay her for her company… for a night at her side… and before that, the masks of a woman full of bluster and bravado, afraid to go home at the end of a long day…_

She continued, sounding as though this was all more of an inconvenience than anything. “Yes, I seem to have stepped on a piece of glass from a broken Christmas ornament. It hurts awfully and there’s quite a lot of blood. Yes, if you could send someone ‘round…“

John sat back on his haunches and watched her finish the conversation, replace the phone on its cradle when she was done, and turn her attention back to the room.

“It’s late, innit?” she asked.

He nodded. “I’ll go.”

“I think that’s best. Don’t want them seeing you here. A doctor will be by soon,” she smiled weakly. “I’ll see you after Christmas.”

“Sure,” he said, throwing his coat on. It had been such a strange exchange—in the span of an hour, going from carnal and sexual to anger and fear to outright dismissal. To say he felt hurt, or confused, would have been an understatement.

“I’m going with Paul to Liverpool in a few days. To spend Christmas up there,” she said. “You should come.”

John shook his head, a tingle rising up his spine. He should have thought of taking her to Liverpool. Or anywhere. Just away, somewhere. He hated being in competition with Paul the Romantic.

“Well,” she replied, unperturbed, with a shrug of her shoulders. “Good night then.”

“Good night.”

He made his way to the door, but she called his name as his hand touched the knob. With a deep sigh, he turned around to face her.

“Did you really mean it? That you’d marry me?”

He nodded. “If you’d ‘ave me.”

She sighed and shut her eyes for a moment. “It’s not supposed to be like this.”

John toed the edge of the rug. “I won’t tell Paul anything,” he said.

When she didn’t respond, he looked up again, and caught her crying.

She ran a hand under her nose and smoothed down flyaway hairs clinging to her cheek. “You’re a real bastard, you know that John?”

He nodded; he knew all too well how awful he could be. _It would be so much easier if I hated you_ ; those had also been her words. “As a matter of fact…”

She swiped at the tears making tracks down her face. “Well. That’s that then.”

“I suppose it is.”

“See you around, Lennon.”

He shook his head and swung the door open. “Happy Crimble,” he said, as much to the cold outside as to her, as he slammed it shut again.

He sat in his car with the lights off while he waited for the paramedical team to arrive, watching them pull into the deserted mews and bustle in through her door. He imagined the scene inside, Julia in her fake London voice laughing and telling them she had too much egg nog and, “… _silly me, dropped the ornament, and would you mind wiping that spot off the floor?_ ” It angered him but, more than that, it made him incredibly sad.

He’d told her he loved her, and he _would_ have married her—in a heartbeat—despite knowing things about her that he’d never asked for, things that made her difficult, things that—in another woman—he might not be so quick to overlook. He’d never been so sure about anything in his entire life as he was about Julia.

She was splintered in a hundred different ways, and he was gutted.

Despite it all, he harboured no illusions about fixing her. He wasn’t about to be anyone’s hero. But he honestly felt he could at least stand at her side and share in the pain a little, and maybe she could share in his, and from the ashes they could craft something a little more real than anything else they’d known.

That promise raised the stakes, contributed to his sureness, but it made him vulnerable, and he hated the feeling. Maybe she was a little right; maybe trading one lousy marriage for the potential of another, even if it might be better, wasn’t the right thing to do. Maybe marriage wasn’t his thing. He was, after all, nothing like Paul McCartney.

 _Paul_ , John thought. He was a part of this, too, and whether that sat right with him or not, John had to just accept it. He wanted Julia and as far as John was concerned, Paul was as attached to her as he was attached to John. It was a confusing, lousy, unholy trinity they’d created.

And yet the farther he got away from Julia’s door, the more he wanted to walk up to Paul’s, to talk it through, every last bit of what he knew, and to let Paul crawl inside his brain and find a solution, the way he did when John had trouble with a line or a chord progression in a song.

 _If it’s not Julia I want, it’s Paul_ , he thought miserably as he finally found the courage to key the ignition and drive off out of the mews. _Paul and Julia. Julia and Paul._

 _They might as well be the only two people in my life_.


	43. Everything Is Sex Except Sex, Which Is Power

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: "[October](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6yJ2XKE1L4)" / "[The Calm](https://musicaonline.org/track/79205514/the+calm)"

* * *

PAUL: I think I just asked Julia to come, and she said yes, so we went. ( _Pause_ ) Julia was hobbling around with a bandage on her foot—she’d had to get stitches for some reason or another, she never told me what happened—and then while we were there, I crashed my moped out in the Wirral and busted my lip bad enough for me to need stitches, too… ( _Quiet laughter_ ) So we were a sad sight, the two of us, her with her little limp and me with the broken face. ( _Long pause_ ) It was supposed to be nice. To head up and be around some familiar faces again, like we’d done earlier, except this time it was _us_ , the two of us, together. ( _Pause_ ) It was just supposed to be easy...

* * *

27 December 1965   
Liverpool  
11:14 pm

“Fuck _me_ , this hurts,” Paul said, staring at himself in the mirror, dejected at the sight of his split lip, the busted tooth beneath it. He poked at the stitches with his finger and winced. It was the first time he’d really looked at his face since getting home from his cousin’s, where a competent but awestruck doctor had nervously stitched up his lip in Bett’s living room. Now that he was here, his heart sank. 

“Stop it, Paul,” Julia admonished him from the bathroom doorway. “You’ll just make it bleed again.”

She stood there, leaning on the door frame with her arms crossed in front of her, a half-empty glass in her hand. Paul ran his tongue against the swollen inside of his lip and tasted blood; he couldn’t tell if it was from the cut in his lip or if he’d cut his tongue against the jagged chip in his front tooth. He spat the blood out into the sink either way. “Yeah well,” was all he said.

It hadn’t been entirely due to speed, though the road conditions had been less than favourable and he knew he shouldn’t have taken things so fast. And he probably should have sobered up a bit more before hopping on. And maybe he should have been more careful, more aware, since Julia was riding behind him, her arms wrapped around his waist, her cheek resting against his back, between his shoulder blades.

But what he remembered of the crash was fleeting and disjointed. He couldn't be sure of anything. The camera of his mind ran the film back at one frame per second so all he got were snippets. He remembered the feeling of the wind in his hair; Julia’s arms tightening against him; the sound of her giggles and the roar of Tara Browne’s moped close behind. The moon, weighty and pendulous in the sky, so low that he ducked more than once fearing he’d hit it with his head; Julia whispering to Paul that she wanted to fly; her arms unclasping, stretching out, out, out. “I’m a bird,” she’d said. “I’m a bird.” A moment’s hesitation, distracted; tilting; the ground speeding up towards his face.

He had no idea how Julia had managed to be thrown clear into a ditch beside the road with barely a scratch. But there she’d been, standing next to him as the blood in his mouth ran down the back of his throat and he became acutely aware that he was staring up at the stars and the whine in his head was coming from his moped, on its side, whirring to a stop a few meters away. He’d tried to downplay for everyone’s sake, but once the adrenaline began to wear off and the reality of what had happened started to resurface, he’d felt like crying.

In the bathroom of Julia’s Liverpool hotel room—because she wouldn’t let him host her at his father’s Wirral home where he’d be staying—he craved aloneness with her, for a chance to mull it over, to ask her why she’d been so desperate to break from the pavement and take flight into the winter-heavy skies...

But Tara—along for the ride in more ways than one—appeared in the doorway to the small bathroom and reminded Paul that they couldn't be alone just yet. Tara had his coat on; he nodded his head at the two of them. “I’m turning in,” he announced.

“So early?” Julia asked.

“It’s been a long day,” Tara smiled, smiling at her. “You know, you're a knockout, Julia. A real knockout.”

Paul waited for the pun, for Tara to joke about how Julia had been the reason Paul had hit the deck. But it never came. Instead, Julia laughed, and her playfulness caused Paul's vision to pulse. "And you, Mr. Guinness, are a darling."

"Still too young for you?"

"Still too _married_ for me," she winked, casting a fleeting glance at Paul.

Paul caught the look and frowned, playing with the stitches in his lip with his tongue until he tasted blood again. He hated watching Julia flirt so openly with the younger man. He spat again into the sink and gulped down what was left of the amber liquid in his own glass, the burn in his throat his only distraction from the burn in his lip.

Tara chuckled and jerked his head towards Paul. "He's practically married too, you know," he said, an Irish lilt on his tongue. 

"Ah, but we've known each other fer years now," Julia intoned brightly. "Since the Quarrymen days."

At this, Tara's eyes widened in surprise. "I didn't know that," he said, looking at Paul. "I thought you two met like everyone else."

Paul watched in the mirror as Julia’s face lost its brightness. "How's that?" Paul asked.

"Well I just mean when  _I_ first met Julia, she was on one of her dates. With a friend of mine, wasn't it?" he asked.

This time, Paul turned around. "One of her dates?" he asked.

“Oh stop it,” Julia admonished, trying to laugh it off but to no avail.

Tara, oblivious to the sudden tension in the room, barrelled ahead. "Come to think of it, didn't I give you two a lift somewhere? Back to his, if I remember correctly." Tara laughed. "He was too drunk. I remember thinking he's not going to get his money's worth out of this date..."

Seeing Julia’s discomfort, Paul stood up to his full height, not quite sure what he was witnessing but determined to stop it. “‘Ey, mate…”

Tara’s eyes widened slightly at Paul's interjection. “Oh, I didn't mean—” he said, finally catching up to the subtext around him. Awkwardly and slowly, Tara nodded and folded his coat over his arms. "Well... lovely night, you two. Glad you survived and all," he said to Paul. It was the last thing spoken before he excused himself, red-faced, from the room and out into the hall of the hotel.

Paul locked eyes with Julia as soon as the door latch clicked into place. “What the hell was that all about?”

Julia hobbled over to the door to lock it; a redundant move, something to occupy herself, a distraction.

“Dates?” he pressed her. "Money's worth?"

“Ah,” she batted her hand in his direction with a grin that Paul was certain was a put-on. “You’re just stroppy because you’ve gone an’ messed up your pretty face.”

Paul noticed the tremble in her voice. "I want to know where he bloody got the idea that you—"

Julia stepped forward and pressed her hand into his. "Forget it," she said, stroking his palm with her thumb. "Please. Just relax, or you'll make your lip bleed again."

The touch of her hand in his was a balm. He forgot his anger, forgot his annoyance, forgot the jealousy that had reared up within him watching his young friend insinuate an unwanted scenario into an already fraught evening. With Julia in front of him, with her small hands clasped in his, it could all be forgotten. Such was her power; her gift.

Paul cocked his head to the side. “Are you sure everything is okay?” he asked her.

“I’m fine,” she cooed.

But it wasn’t. He was preoccupied with the pain, yes, but now a different goal entered his mind, one he had to attain in order to dispel the dark clouds of Tara’s innuendo. He wanted her to be his, _all_ his, wanted to assert that desire for however brief a moment it would take to feel she _was_ his again. With a groan borne out of this sudden longing, Paul hauled Julia against him. Her words, the attention she’d given him a moment earlier, the touch of her hand… it all worked like magic. The previous unpleasantness, only thirty seconds removed from their current moment, felt like a lifetime away, hazy and indistinct as far-off memories are.

He nuzzled her neck and lifted her off the ground, backing her into the bedroom beyond. “My only real regret is that I can’t kiss you the way I want to right now,” he said.

Julia wiggled a bit and laughed, but her voice was tinged with admonishment. “Paul, put me down.”

“I’m serious,” he said. “If I didn’t have these stitches, you’d be in for the ravishment of your young life.”

“Paul,” she said, sternly, and he set her feet to the floor. “Come on, you've had a serious accident. You can’t go pushing yourself.”

“It’d be worth it,” he grinned, “To die in your arms of exhaustion…”

Julia pushed herself firmly, away and out of his grasp. “Jesus,” she said, clearly and plainly unamused as she limped away toward the bed.

Confused, Paul followed her with his eyes. It took a moment for them to adjust from the bright light of the bathroom vanity to the muted darkness of the room. She had already made it to the liquor cabinet and was pouring herself another drink with unsteady hands.

“We’re a sorry lot, the two of us," he teased. "You with a gimpy foot, me and my face..."

Julia stopped and set the glass down. “Jesus, Paul! You could have died.” Her voice was pitched with fear, anxiety angled in her shoulders and the stiffness of her posture. If it hadn't been so out-of-character, he’d have felt positively chuffed to be the object of such worry.

“I s’pose so,” he said, striding over to grab her glass and moving to the bed. She followed him. “You could’ve too, you know.”

She didn’t seem to hear him, planting herself on the mattress and waving her arms above her with wild abandon. “You’d be dead, in a morgue somewhere, and I’d be stuck here with Tara Browne… who would tell The Beatles that their bassist was dead?”

Paul reclined next to her on the bed, shutting his eyes tightly. “I don’t know.”

“Yeah,” she said, her voice shaking. “Pretty stupid of yeh.”

He pushed himself up on one elbow. “You were the one trying to take flight, need I remind you!” he snapped. “If you’d just kept your arms tucked away and stopped fidgeting—”

But he didn’t finish the sentence, letting his words trail off and be replace by silence, punctuated only by the occasional _clink_ of her glass when she picked it up to drink or set it down on the bedside table again. Eventually, Paul heard her sigh, and when he turned to look at her, he saw she was crying.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to be such a shit about it. You’re here. I’m here. A little beat up but no worse for wear.”

“I know.”

“Look at me,” he commanded gently. “There’s no sense borrowing trouble.” He leaned up on one arm and rested his free hand atop hers, clasped on her lower stomach. “So let’s focus on what _is_ , okay?”

“What _is_?” she asked him. “What actually _is_ , Paul? Because I don’t think I know anymore.”

Paul shook his head and flopped over on the bed. The room had been spinning on account of the pain medication he’d been given, and now with the added effects of the alcohol in his system, he felt as though he were on a Tilt-a-Whirl.

“Whaddya mean?” he drawled.

She sighed and leaned her head back against the pillow. “I’m so drunk.”

“Yeah, about that…” Paul started.

“I know, I know,” she said, pushing herself upright and, as if on cue, blanching and reeling through a nauseated retch that produced nothing. Julia pressed the back of her hand to her lips and closed her eyes, waiting for the nausea to pass. When it did, she blinked. “I know. I drink too much. I dunno. Nothin’ better to do, sitting around at home waiting for one of you to call on me.”

She’d said it like it was a joke, but the sting in her eye made him question how much she was laughing, truly. He leaned back against the pillows with a heavy sigh.

“I don’t want to put you through this.”

“Through what?”

“This whole thing,” he said. “With me an’ John. But making a choice—”

“I can’t decide and you know that.”

“I know,” he said. “And that’s part of the problem. If you _could_ just choose, one way or the other, at least we’d _know_. We could move on. All of us.”

She shook her head, letting her hair fall into her eyes before flinging it back over her shoulder again.

Paul continued. “But then I don’t really want you to choose. If you chose me, it’d be great, but The Beatles would be over. And if you chose John, well—”

“Are you ever going to marry Jane?” she asked.

Caught off guard, Paul didn’t know what to say. “Where did that come from?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “What Tara said is true. You’ve been together for a long time, and you’re more of the marryin’ kind, so eventually it’s had to ‘ave come up between the two of you, right?”

Perplexed, Paul scratched his head. “So what if it has?”

“Well what would ‘appen? To us?” she wondered. “If you were married too?”

Paul was growing frustrated. “Jesus…”

“I just need to know where I stand with you,” she said, her voice shaking. “I mean, I know where I stand with John; I want to hear it from you. What am I to _you_?”

“With John?” he asked, more to himself than her. “Well, this oughta be good. Where _do_ you stand with John?”

She shook her head. “I don’t wanna fight, Paul.”

“No, I’m serious,” he said. “I wanna know.”

She sighed. “It’s been a long day—”

“You brought it up.”

“And now I’m finishing it.”

“What, did he tell you he’d leave Cyn for you? Did he ask you marry him? Is that what this is about?”

Julia just sat, cross-legged on the bed, and folded her hands in her lap; her eyes stayed trained on her intertwined fingers, perfectly manicured and sitting just-so atop the bandage on her foot. She didn’t move, or speak, but her silence spoke volumes.

Paul felt as if he’d been sucker-punched. If he hadn’t crashed his bike, he might have asked her himself, that night, under the stars in the backyard of his dad’s home, or maybe just in the middle of the hotel room when he’d dropped her off that night. He would have asked her— _For the second time_ , he thought, remembering a lazy day and a promise of eternal love in the parlour of his father's home, followed by her rejection, which had been so total that he’d almost forgotten about it entirely—and she would have said yes, and maybe he would have roused the Mayor of Liverpool himself to do the job right then and there, and they would have made love for the first time under a sliver of a moon as husband and wife. He had the ring in the bottom of his suitcase, nestled between a pair of trousers and his favourite shirt—a shirt that she’d picked out for him on a model in the window at Simpsons of Piccadilly earlier that spring, one she loved to see him in, one that always made him think of her.

That ring, packed on a whim, hadn’t been out of its hiding place in a year now. He’d brought it with him for a reason.

He couldn’t very well pull it out now.

“Jesus,” he breathed. “Well isn’t that just fuckin’ perfect.”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

But Paul wasn’t finished. “Well, maybe you _should_ marry him. That would be the icing on the cake of this crummy arrangement anyway,” he said, pushing himself off the bed to fix himself a drink. “You can go off together and ‘ave lots of babies and won’t that be a laugh when you look back on the days when you used to slum it with whats-his-face on bass, the guy who used to write stupid love songs, wasn’t that a lark?”

“You’re being melodramatic.”

Paul couldn’t help the acerbity as he swallowed every last drop of whatever-it-was and spat the words out across the room at her. “And _you’re_ a whore.”

 _Like so much blood into a dirty hotel sink._  

The words tumbled out before he’d had a chance to anticipate their effect, and he immediately wished with every fibre of his being that he could reel them back in. For what it was worth, it was the first honest moment he’d had with her in weeks, even if he didn’t know where the idea had come from or why he was saying it; he’d seen the way Tara had treated her, had watched her face for signs of her response, any response, to it all, and it had all added up in his mind to something worthy of reaction. So he'd reacted. Unfairly, yes; a bit melodramatically, too, he'd have to give her that. But he'd felt something, and said it, without a filter to smooth the edges and make it palatable. In the situation they currently occupied, that was progress.

But he knew that would mean nothing to Julia. The shock and pain on her face was written clear as day in the lines of her eyes and her mouth; slowly, it gave way to the most intense anger he’d ever seen on the face of a woman. But there was a brief moment of indelible sadness, too. Her eyes dipped at the corners and her lashes fluttered as she inhaled. The cool grey irises he’d fallen in love with—the ones that reminded him of the cold northern sea, cobbled streets, and slate grey skies of Liverpool—seemed to darken, mist over, as her eyes filled with tears. Tears which he knew only he had caused. Her lips, already pale and drawn, twitched downward for a second, maybe two. Paul felt more remorse than he’d ever felt in his life.

“Fuck you."

“Julia, I-I didn’t mean—”

“No. Fuck you.”

His hands shaking, Paul set his glass down and smoothed them down the legs of his trousers. “I’m so sorry.”

“You don’t get t’ say that,” she shook her head. “Not now. Not after everything.”

He shook his head. “No, I know, you’re right. It was wrong. I’m a complete bastard—”

“How _dare_ you?” she seethed. She had yet to stand up or move a muscle, which unnerved him even more—the evenness with which she was conducting her body left him cold. “After everything we’ve been through, and everything I’ve given up for you, you _stand there_ and call _me_ a whore? How many girls ‘ave you ‘ad this year, Paul? Ten? Twenty?”

“I’m sorry,” he said again, shaking his head, realizing his mistake. “I mean—I don’t know what I mean.”

She stood up then. “To answer your fuckin’ question, John did ask me. And I would’ve said yes if I hadn’t thought you had feelings for me. Clearly, I was mistaken.”

“You’re not,” he said, crossing the room to stand as close to her as he could while still being out of arm’s reach. “You mean _so much_ to me.”

“Golly gee,” she dripped with sarcasm, “I’d hate to see what it looks like to be in yer _bad_ books, McCartney. Really.”

He braved another step. “It was a stupid thing to say. I’m frustrated. It was wrong. I was reactin’ to Tara and ‘is comments and I—”

“What does Tara Browne possibly know about me that you don’t?” she asked.

“I don’t know, Julia!" he cried. "That’s the problem! I feel like everyone knows you better than I do!”

She shook her head. “Yer bloody lucky I can barely walk right now, or I swear to god, I’d cripple you.”

“I know,” he wailed. “And I would deserve it.”

She heaved a sigh and broke the fiery gaze she’d been steadying on him since she first began to speak. He wondered if that was it, if it was over, if that was all that would come of it. _I should be so lucky_ …

His thoughts were cut off by Julia’s sudden hands on his lower stomach, pulling up at the bottom of his button-down shirt, tucked within his waistband.

“Julia—”

“Get ‘em off.”

He didn’t think to argue but swiftly worked to free the shirt, while she hurriedly unbuckled his belt and let his pants fall to the floor in a pool around his ankles. Paul was only half done the buttons when Julia, impatiently, lifted it over his head and pulled it off rather than waiting, sending buttons _pinging_ off against the radiator beneath the window. She pulled herself up to him and kissed the base of his throat, eliciting a growl that vibrated against her lips.

“The rest,” she breathed, her voice husky and warm on his skin, and while he made swift work of his underthings, he felt the weight of her heavy woolen pants as she pushed them down her legs and to the floor, falling on his feet. Before he knew it, she was pushing him back against the bed and he was falling, falling, falling...

“Julia-aah—” he croaked as she reached between them and grasped him firmly with one hand. He leaned his head back against the covers and closed his eyes. “This isn’t—we should talk—”

“Tell me to stop. I dare you,” she menaced, and when he didn’t say anything, she covered his mouth with hers, only pausing once to ensure she wasn’t damaging his stitches. She slid her tongue within his mouth and twisted her hand along the length of him, and he groaned again. Instincts lifted his hands to grip her—anywhere!—but the moment she felt his fingers graze her breasts, she reeled back and slapped him, hard, across the face. It startled Paul out of the trance she’d put him in and pushed him closer to the edge at the same time, arousing him in a way he hadn’t expected.

“ _Don’t touch me._ ”

“O-Okay,” he offered, his voice meek. She climbed on top of him and straddled his waist, positioning herself above him with her hand still working him from base to tip. He was nearly there. In the dark of the room, lit only by the partially reflected glow from the bathroom, he could barely make out her features, but he didn’t have to see her face to know what was coming. He felt her let go of him and dip her fingers deep within herself, then slicking them up and down his length once, then twice, before she let herself drop down, taking him in completely.

With her hands free she pinned his arms to his side and pushed herself up and down, over and over, her moans starting to come more and more frequently as she moved. Paul didn’t know how much more he could take; he ached to touch her, to feel her grinding against him, to press his fingers into the juncture of her thighs and coax her to climax as he’d done so many times before. But the more he tried, the harder she held him, and the closer he got to finishing...

Then she called his name, breathless at first and then with more force as she dropped her head to his chest and he felt her clench around him, squeezing him tighter and tighter as the first notes of her orgasm rained down on her. And she took him with her; her voice, hoarse and dry and cut with too-much liquor, managed to form the sound of his name a third time, and his hips jerked skyward for the last. His own cry, from deep within him, felt as though it tore most of his larynx out with it as it ripped from his throat.

It was the longest and most excruciatingly pleasurable climax he’d ever experienced, and he was still riding it out as she dropped herself on top of him in a heap.

For a very long moment he didn’t move a muscle, desperate to keep her even-keeled but also reeling from the shock of how incredibly heady that moment had been, how erotic. He was so turned on, still; his brain was a mess. But their breathing began to even out; Paul felt Julia’s heartbeat easing as he pressed a kiss to her temple. He swallowed hard and slowly, shakily, freed his arms, wrapping them around her shivering body.

“Julia,” he whispered in her ear, a moment before he realised she was crying. “Hey…”

With as much tenderness as he could muster, Paul moved the two of them over and deposited Julia on the bed beside him, where she curled into his side without hesitation, finding a home for her head in the crook of his neck. He felt her tears slide down his skin, falling to the bedspread beneath them.

“Paul,” she whispered. “Paul, Paul…”

“It’s okay, love,” he said, smoothing back her dampened hair from her forehead.

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

She paused, inhaled a shuddering breath that shook them both, and sighed deeply. “I don’t know what came over me.”

Paul shrugged. “You did slap me pretty hard…”

She managed a small giggle. “I did, didn’t I?”

He smiled. “I deserved it.”

Julia was quiet for a long moment before rolling over onto her back, staring at the ceiling. “You were only saying what I’ve been thinking.”

“It’s not true,” he gulped. “I was wrong to say it.”

“It’s okay.”

He pulled her against him, this time with her back pressing against his chest. “You are so beautiful,” he said. He rested his hands on the swell of her hips and the soft, winter fullness of her belly, letting them roam. “God, I’ve never been more in love with someone—”

She pushed his hand away, “Paul, stop.”

“What?” he asked, genuinely perplexed. “Julia, you asked where you stood with me. I’m tellin’ you: I love you.”

She pressed her fingers to her eyes and rolled herself over until they were facing each other again.

“I’ll marry you,” he confessed. “If that’s what you need, if that’s what you _want_ , I’ll marry you. It’s what I’ve wanted since the first time I asked you.”

Julia sighed. “That was a long time ago though. We were kids.”

It didn’t matter to Paul. “I just want to be with you. Because it’s what I need. More than anything else in the world.” He kissed her, again and again. “I’d be the happiest Scouser if you said yes.”

Paul could see a faint smile on Julia’s face. “It’s not that easy.”

“Is that what you told John?”

She sighed. “Of course it is, Paul,” she stroked his face. “Of course it is.”

He leaned back against the pillow beneath his head and shut his eyes; weary from the events of the day and gobsmacked by the turn of the last few minutes, he felt as though he could sleep for days.

“I love you,” he whispered.

Julia kissed his forehead, next to the butterfly stitches above his eyebrow. “Go to sleep, love.”

They were the last words he heard before he did, indeed, drift off to sleep.

* * *

PAUL: When I woke up, she was gone. She left a note on my pillow thanking me for the trip, and asking if I’d say goodbye to my dad and brother and Angie and Ruth for her. She also asked me to meet her at her place the night I returned to London, couple of days later. ( _Pause_ ) It was so strange, you know, it took me most of the morning to sort it through in my head. At the time it was simultaneously the most frightening and most exhilarating night of my life, and I had no idea what any of it meant.

MURPHY: What did you think she wanted to meet you about?

PAUL: I didn’t dare think about it. That was the thing with Julia, if you haven’t picked that up yet: she defied every expectation you ever had about her. I didn’t want to get my hopes up. So I pushed it aside, you know. It was two days away and I figured I could wait...


	44. A Love That Should Have Lasted Years

Chapter Soundtrack: "[This Place Was A Shelter](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eo1xMC7VbU)" / "[Here, There, and Everywhere](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LCGqNjcLbw)" / "[For No One](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuDDFo9pB18)"

JOHN: She rang me up and asked if I could arrange for her to be picked up at the train station. I just assumed that the trip ended early and Paul had asked her to leave separately, since we’d all heard about the accident already and the press would be everywhere upon his return. Obviously I couldn’t pick her up myself, but I told her I’d send a car around. Then out of the blue she asked me to stop by a couple of days later.

WILSON: Was that strange?

JOHN: Yeah, well it raised some alarm bells for me. She’d never been one to actively schedule anything—we had always done the asking, and she would refuse if she was busy and we would just assume she was with the other and let it go. So for her to suddenly take an interest in the planning of it—I won’t say it scared me but I took notice. And I agreed, of course…

* * *

29 December 1965  
Weymouth Mews 

If John had been paying attention, he would have seen Paul standing on the stoop from the entrance to the mews rather than being startled by him as stepped into the light from the gas lamp above the neighbour's garage door. As it was, his jubilant mood dampened considerably. He wondered if he’d gotten the date wrong.

“Hey,” John said.

Paul turned, and the look of surprise on his face was unmistakable. “John.”

“What’re you doin’ ‘ere?”

“I could ask you the same question.”

“Julia invited me.”

“Same.”

John cocked an eyebrow, reminded suddenly of that night the year before, when they’d revived the Society. “Is this a put-on?”

Paul turned back to the door and gave a series of three short, fast raps with his knuckles on the panel. “Nobody’s answerin.’” He turned back to the door and shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his coat.

“You feelin’ better?” John asked.

Paul seemed confused, but then gently ran the tip of his tongue over his lip in vague remembrance. “Oh, yeah. Doesn’t hurt so much now.”

“It’ll be a nice scar,” John drawled in his best American imitation. “Chicks dig scars.”

Paul chuckled a little to himself. “Maybe. Maybe I’ll grow a mustache.”

“Fancy that.”

Paul turned his attention back to the door and stepped forward again, rapping on it with his knuckles a few more times before trying the door handle. To their surprise, the latch fell away easily, and the door swung open without impediment.

John looked to Paul. “Whaddya suppose—?”

Paul shrugged but stuck his head in the opening. “Julia?”

John pushed the door open fully and the two of them stepped in. It was dark, save for the light above her door; John flicked the foyer light on, illuminating the entry and spilling light into the living room and kitchen beyond. In the dimness he still couldn't see much at all; squinting as his eyes adjusted to the dark, he stepped in and pushed the switches to turn the lights on in the living room.

He tried again. "Julia?"

"Jules?" Paul called from behind John at the same time. They turned to look at each other, then back at the rest of the house.

Everything appeared pretty much exactly as it had the day he’d left last. Without bothering to take off his boots, he scanned the rooms beyond the doorway. It was tidy, neat. Clean, even; cleaner than he could remember seeing it before. The tree was up, decorated as it had been when Julia had cut her foot. He even noticed the pile of broken glass in the corner exactly where he’d left it.

Paul stepped out of the foyer behind John. “Julia?”

"She's not here," John said.

Paul motioned toward the kitchen. “It seems all cleaned out.”

John didn’t want to agree, but he couldn’t help the feeling. Paul cocked his head towards the stairs and John nodded, watching as Paul took to the treads, two at a time.

The more John looked around him, the more uneasy he grew. Dishes were stacked in the cupboards and cutlery lay on the drying rack to be put away, but the personal touches were gone. Books, knick knacks, small picture frames: all gone. 

So it wasn’t a surprise for John to hear the panic in Paul’s voice as he called down to him from upstairs. As he took to the stairs and gained the first landing, he saw into the room where Paul was standing; it appeared to have been ransacked. Suitcases filled with paints and swatches of fabric from her renovation littered the floor. Again, every last photo had been torn from the walls. 

John's first instinct was to look for signs of a struggle: blood, broken objects, glass. But there was nothing to be found. Just a mess. 

_Like someone leaving in an awful hurry..._

“She had those photos,” Paul said, pointing to a spot beside the window. “Right here. The collage. The little framed ones.”

John knew what Paul was talking about: photos of Liverpool, of them, of Julia in front of a candle flame. His throat closed up as he stared, dumbstruck, at the scene around him, and a shiver raced through his body.

This place that he had loved, that had provided such sanctuary to him, felt cold and lifeless. Empty. Dead.

"You don't suppose someone broke in?"

John shook his head, his heart already leading him to the only conclusion that seemed likely. "To take picture frames and books and records?"

"Maybe fans," Paul suggested, though he didn't seem all that convinced; he cast his panicked eyes around the room one last time and called Julia's name, heading for the bathroom on the landing outside. "What if something happened to her? What if she's hurt?"

John was already taking the stairs up to the bedroom. "Julia, are you here?" he tried again as he pushed on the bedroom door. It creaked open on sticky hinges; he knew the sound well. Tonight, it provided no comfort or nostalgia as it echoed through the space beyond it. The bedroom wasn't empty by any stretch but it had been similarly upturned to the room downstairs; sheets were tangled at the foot of the bed, dresser drawers pulled open and emptied. Personal touches, all gone. 

Save one.

John saw it on the windowsill from across the room, and he carefully walked across the floorboards, stepping over discarded bits of clothing, a broken pair of high heels, and sheets of paper—notebook paper, lined paper, musical notation, lyrics, some in his handwriting, some in Paul's—all scattered across the floor beneath his feet. He knew without a doubt what it was that he was looking at, and he didn't need to get a closer look to confirm it, but picking it up off the sill made it all the more real: it was the tattered, dog-eared, stained copy of  _Dubliners_ that Julia had cherished so much;

"What's that?" Paul asked from the door.

John hadn't even heard him come up. Seeing the book so casually left behind amidst such disarray left John cold. “She wouldn’t leave without this,” he said, entertaining the notion that maybe something  _had_ happened to her... 

 _No, don't be daft Lennon,_ he chided himself.  _You know where she's gone..._

Paul had come to stand beside him. “Open it,” Paul said, his voice low.

John saw a deep fold in a group of pages and thumbed his way to section, carefully de-creasing the dog-ear as he scanned the words; without his glasses on, it was hopeless. Frustration crept into his marrow. “I can’t…”

Paul joined him at his side and bowed his head over the pages until he found the underlined passages. With a breath, he began: “ _She answered nothing. She felt her cheek pale and cold and, out of a maze of distress, she prayed to God to direct her, to show her what was her duty…_ ” Paul spoke, and John followed as his finger jumped to the next set of underlined sentences. “ _Her distress awoke a nausea in her body and she kept moving her lips in silent fervent prayer. A bell clanged upon her heart. She felt him seize her hand: ‘Come!’_ ”

Paul’s voice cracked, and John could feel his own emotions rising within his chest.

“ _All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her. She gripped with both hands at the iron railing. ‘Come!’ No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish. ‘Eveline! Evvy!’ He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at her to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition._ ”

Paul closed the book and John heard him sniff and cough a bit to disguise it, but it was impossible to miss the fact that the younger man was crying. John rubbed his eyes.

“So what does that mean?"

John knew. He knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt. "She’s gone.”

“She _left_?" Paul asked. "Again?”

John shook, from dejection and cold anger. “She left,” he repeated.

Paul swore. “And this is how she tells us? With a fuckin’ page of underlined words in a goddamn James Joyce story?”

“Not entirely,” John said as his attention shifted back to the book, to a piece of paper wedged into the pages. WIth thick fingers he fished it out, scoured the shapes on the page; but he could make neither heads nor tails of it, so he shoved it back towards Paul. “I can’t fuckin’ read this.”

Paul obliged.

_“This isn't working. I _’m drowning. You’re drowning me. Both of you. This isn’t a choice between you—I’m choosing_ neither, again, and for the last time. I hope you can understand someday that it’s not personal, not about you, but I just can’t do this. I love you both far too much to drag this out. _

_So that’s that._

_Love, always love,_

_Julia._ ”

This time, John didn’t bother trying to hide his tears; even without the letter, Paul’s own crying fit would have made it impossible to succeed. John wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

Paul folded the letter back up. “Bollocks. I’m gonna find ‘er—”

“How, Paul?” John reasoned. “Where would you even start? Everything she owned was in here, and you can see she’s cleaned it out." He took a breath, let it out in a deep, long sigh. "She doesn’t _want_ us to find ‘er.”

Paul’s anguished sob cut to the heart of him. John was furious.

“What happened, Paul? She was fine when I last talked to her, when I last saw her," John lied. "Then she goes back home with you and everything falls apart!”

“Nothin’ happened!” he said. "What happened between _you_ two? She didn't seem all that happy with _you_ , either!"

“Well it must’ve been you, because I ‘aven’t said—”

“We had a fight, okay? Tara made some comments,” he looked at John. ”I think… I think she was... she was a—“

John lip curled in disdain. “This isn’t the Asher’s parlour, Paul. Just fuckin’ say it!" he cursed. "She was a call girl. A prostitute.”

Paul swallowed, stared dumbly at John as his words struck him fully. "You knew?"

John watched as his bandmate’s face registered the full meaning, as everything dawned, crystal clear.

“Did you ever pay her?” Paul spat.

“Fuck off.”

“You knew and you still asked her to marry you?”

John was stung. “She fuckin’ _told_ you that?”

“Yeah, she fuckin’ told me,” Paul replied, “Why’d you ask her?”

John shook his head as he began to walk away. “I don’t have to tell you dick.”

“Well neither do I, but I will tell yeh that yours wasn’t the only marriage proposal, but _unlike_ yours, _mine_ was serious.”

John aimed his sights on Paul, his hand fisted at his side. “I swear to god!”

“Or what?” Paul asked. “She rejected me the same way she rejected you, didn’t she? We’re both losers here."

“Speak for yourself.”

"So if you want to hit someone—"

"Don't tempt me!"

“You’re a prick, Lennon. A real class act.”

“And you’re such a catch?”

They stared at each other, eye-to-eye, for a long moment. Paul sank back against the wall and bit back another round of tears as he shoved the letter into his pocket.

John reached for the paper. “Fuck that, I’m keepin’ it.”

“Take the fuckin’ book,” Paul said, shoving the volume at him and dropping it into his hands.

John failed to grab it in time and the book tumbled to the floor. He didn’t stoop to pick it up; he just stared at it, his eyes misting over. He didn’t blink to clear them, content to let them obscure his vision. As if not seeing would make it less real.

“I don’t know what to do,” he admitted finally.

Paul sighed. “Me neither.”

It was the last word they said on the subject to one another.

When they reached the door to the Asher’s Wimpole Street home, a few fans stopped them for autographs but they pushed their way through and wearily trudged up to the door. Jane swung it open, welcoming them inside with smiles tossed to the fans on the step. Once they congregated in the foyer, safe behind the door, silence that had been a comfort in the close confines of the car became unbearable, and Paul, burdened with the same grief John felt only too keenly, collapsed against the tiny redhead.

“I love you, I love you,” he sobbed, shoulders shaking with such force that John felt obliged to steady the younger man before he toppled over and took Jane with him. Horrified, Jane tried her best to both console him and understand what was going on, failing miserably on both accounts, through no fault of her own.

John took over for the beleaguered young woman, hauling Paul against him and up the stairs. The weight of his own heart hung heavy in his chest, but it was nothing compared to the dead weight of Paul’s body as they trudged up to his attic bedroom and deposited themselves on the tiny bed in the corner, fully clothed and resting against each other, where Paul fell asleep only moments before John, weary and heartbroken and alone, save for each other.

* * *

JOHN: That night changed us, absolutely. I knew things had to be different, that it would be too much, too hard, to pretend that it was the same. But we didn’t talk about Julia after that. There was so much more on our plates that… well, I guess she couldn’t have picked a better time to disappear again. For better or for worse, we were so busy we couldn’t stop and think but had to just push through. And after my Jesus comment and the trouble we had with touring and finally deciding to just stop… we had so much more to deal with that Julia just sort of faded into the background. I know I didn’t think about her as much. And the drugs certainly helped in that regard…

* * *

PAUL: That’s how you get albums like _Revolver_ , you know? Multi-tracked instruments, looped vocals, reverse guitars. It wasn’t _all_ surreal acid trips and drugged-out epiphanies, though those helped. Most of that was just straight up musical and spiritual growth, as a band and as people, too. ( _Pause_ ) I suppose if you wanted to point to something inspirational, you’d have to point at Julia, or the Julia-shaped hole in our lives. Because even though she wasn’t there, she was still the muse in a lot of ways. Songs like “For No One” or “Here, There, and Everywhere”… and they were easy to record, easier than you might think. I would sit down to write it and get it all out there, and then we’d—John and I—we’d work it to death and by the time it came down to recording it, it had become rote, you know? You sang it because you knew it by heart, you could do it in your sleep, and it wasn’t difficult, even though they were about her.

* * *

JOHN: We never confided in one another, not after that night. We took it out in song when we had to. But we never talked. I could never wrap my head around how he could still have this image in his mind of Julia as a perfect creature worthy of a gilded pedestal. I mean, he was out there writing songs—”For No One”, you know, that’s a great song, one of my favorites, and I always thought he actually borrowed from James Joyce, the line about “no sign of love” or whatever. Straight from that story she’d underlined in her book—so he’s writing these songs for her, but she’s not the girl he’s writing about, not to me. I wished he would see that she was a woman, with a heart and a soul and deep pain, that she was no angel sent to Earth to guide him or us or whatever to where we needed to be. It bothered me that we weren’t on the same page. And it wasn’t necessarily because I didn’t want him to make the same mistakes over and over again. I just wanted to be on the same page again.

WILSON: But you weren’t finished with her, were you?

JOHN: Yeah, but we didn’t know that at the time.

\- End Tape -

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry this story is so long... there's still one Part to go, beginning in mid-1967 and going until the rooftop concert...I'll work on getting those chapters going in the next few days. It's all written; I just have to edit and format it properly, and that takes time... thanks for understanding. I hope you're still enjoying the story all the same!!


	45. Together Reveries

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: "[Reveries](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRjllL-MP0U)" / "[Reunion](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnPTgF1K-GM)"

* * *

 

 Part III  
\- Tape 3: Paul McCartney -  
\- 24 April 1976 - 

MURPHY: Tape three… interview with Paul McCartney… April twenty-fourth, nineteen seventy six… ( _rustling paper; a distant cough_ ) Are you all right to continue?

PAUL: Sure. Where were we?  
  
MURPHY: You were talking about the changes in the group…

PAUL: Right. Yeah, it’d been a big year, nineteen sixty-six, and we were heading into another one, we just didn’t know it. They say even to this day—not to sound big-headed about it—but that level of market domination is still impressive, in terms of album sales and radio play. I don’t know. We had stopped touring, of course, and people were heralding the death knell of The Beatles because how could we possibly continue as a group without performing live? So I guess there was some pressure to really show them “Aha, see, we did alright.” ( _P_ _ause_ ) We would have been alright, you know, if it had all ended there—we’d conquered America, become millionaires—but it was satisfying to have that in our back pockets, you know, to say to our critics “Yeah, fine, we stopped touring, but then we made _Revolver,"_   yeah? But I just wanted to stick it to them all. Really show them. And we did.

* * *

WILSON: Were the drugs particularly influential?

JOHN: Maybe in the beginning but I saw them as a crutch for a while, too, so there’s that as well. It’s not so simple, and when people try to reduce that period to just drugs or whatever, it diminishes what we were actually doing. You can’t write a good song when you’re stoned, you know. Maybe you have an insight, and you remember that, and you write it down later, but if you try to figure that out when you can’t see straight it’s a waste of time and, frankly, ruins the trip. ( _Pause_ ) We could record high. But it didn’t always turn out very well.

* * *

PAUL: I remember one time—well, I don’t remember _exactly_ when it was, but it was during the _Pepper_ recordings—but we took acid together. It was maybe my second time. John had gone up to the roof of the studio, was really out of it, because he’d taken the wrong pills, but we got him down and back to my place and there we were, together, but he was on this other level entirely. ( _Pause_ ) I just wanted to be where he was, with him. That’s what it always was, you know: a desire to be with John… 

* * *

JOHN: I didn’t mean to take it. I never took acid in the studio. But I thought they were different pills. So it was an accident. But once they were in my system, there was nothing for it. I think George Martin went with me up to the roof, maybe to get some fresh air—this is what I’ve been told—and the next thing I knew, Paul was yanking me back down the stairs and bustling me off to his place down the road. 

WILSON: What was his worry? 

JOHN: ( _Pause_ ) We’d been recording for _Sgt. Pepper_. I think it was “Getting Better”. And I started to sing and speak in tongues. I thought I was normal. But they knew something was up. All I remember is thinking about Julia, on the bridge in Paris, leaping up onto the stone railing and spreading her arms wide, trying to fly… 

* * *

PAUL: He said he wanted to fly, because Julia had wanted to fly. He was going to fly far away to find her and bring her back. That’s what he told me as I helped him down the stairs and into the car…

* * *

22 March 1967  
St. John’s Wood, London  
Morning

Paul and John lay sprawled out on the floor, shoulder to shoulder, staring up at the ceiling of 7 Cavendish, slowly coming around after their long, twinned acid trip. Night had come and gone, as had the sunrise, fully twelve hours having elapsed since Paul had taken his hit of acid and joined John on the front room rug. Now, Paul waited for the feeling of swimming in a sea of rose taupe and gold to dissolve into reality. John, for his part, had come down an hour earlier, but hadn’t left the bassist’s side. In the corner of the room, plugged into a rarely-used wall outlet, was a record player, needle spinning in the record’s lead out groove. How long it had been spinning, Paul had no idea. All he knew was that the soft, rhythmic _hhhwach hhhwach hhhwach_ produced with each rotation was calming, relaxing; he imagined it was a heartbeat, slow and steady, heard through water…

“You there Macca?”

“Mm,” Paul sighed.

John leaned back on his elbows. “Did I fly?" he asked.

Paul thought it a silly question, but as it registered in the parts of his brain newly freed from the haze of LSD clouding him earlier, he remembered coaxing John off the roof of their recording studio, realizing that John had mistakenly taken LSD and not the uppers he believed he’d swallowed a short time before. Paul had joined him once they got inside, settling into the carpet and throw rugs. Rattled by the events and the mix of pleading and goading in John’s eyes—”Is it all right?” he kept asking, and no one had any idea how to answer him—Paul had only one wish. He turned on and floated to wherever it was John was, and the night had unfolded, and everything was okay.

“We thought you might try and jump,” Paul said, scrubbing a hand over his face. “That you might think you could fly.”

John chuckled. “For a moment there I thought maybe I already was…”

Paul could believe it. Within moments after partaking, he’d felt as though he could fly as well. Paul's own first time, not long earlier, had been marked by emotional epiphanies, about himself and his place in the world, that bordered on the divine. But this time had been different; still emotional, yes, but tied to something personal and spiritual that seemed to link him to John in a way he’d never imagined possible. Paul had flashes of remembrance, of sitting cross-legged on the floor, facing John, as they’d done years earlier in the front parlour of the house in Forthlin Road. They’d pushed the table out of the way and made room for themselves to sprawl out if they’d needed to; their bodies had been clam-shelled, angled towards each other, their foreheads almost touching. It had taken a while for the world to shift, but shift it had. After a moment, he hadn’t been able to tell where he’d ended and John began. 

Only a few weeks before he’d watched Jane make a marble cake in his kitchen; the way she’d pulled a butter knife through the different coloured batter, swirling and twisting it to create the mottled appearance, came back to him in that initial shifting moment. He had felt like the batter, and time was the knife, pulling him one way and then another, bleeding him out into the room with each pass. He’d sat there, enjoying the feeling, until John had started to laugh, his voice splintering and hitting Paul like ice shards and bringing him back into the present. They’d held each other’s gaze, whispered words to each other that felt like another language, one they’d invented, one only they could understand.

He’d begun to feel and see noises around him—cars on the street had appeared in front of him like sheets of brown canvas, moving left to right or right to left across his field of vision; the sound of a clock ticking down the hall was water, somehow dripping on the top of his head; John had gotten up to put on a record and the sounds coming from the speakers were a mix of sharp-bladed yellow staccato strikes on the piano, walls of wavy pink soprano and pools of teal green bass notes. Paul had had no idea what song they were listening to; he only knew he’d never heard it like this before, _seen_ the music before, so colourful, so _vibrant_.

He’d laughed, and to his own ears, his voice sounded faraway and disembodied, purple in colour. He’d seen strips of silk flowing from his mouth as the sound left, so he’d kept on laughing, deliberately forcing the sounds, watching the deep maroon shoot left and right from between his lips. He’d been enchanted, bewildered; the room was his canvas and his voice was the paint. It was breathtaking.

John had sat down in front of him again, and Paul had thought he’d seen a ribbon of light surrounding his friend, a pulsating white aura that radiated warmth, an ethereal glow, and that seemed to connect to him as well—tendrils of warm light that shot out from John’s skin had tickled spots on Paul’s. And Paul had watched, mesmerized, as the light had intensified. Different colours came from different areas, Paul had noticed, and had seemed to connect to the same spots on Paul. A strong, deep purple wisp had emanated from between their eyebrows, locking them together; another grass-green thread had held them fast at the solar plexus; a deep blood orange tether ran pelvis to pelvis between their bodies. Paul had felt rooted in that moment, as though if he’d tried to lean back and break the bonds he saw he’d be met with resistance. It had scared him a little, to feel the strength of those bonds holding him tighter, growing stronger with each passing minute

Each time he’d breathed, in sync with John, sparkling coloured orbs had danced away from their bodies in their breath and along the vibrations created by their movement to join with the rainbow threads holding them together. The threads then began to take on texture and weight; the glowing yellow cord running from their navels felt to Paul like lava, powerful and hot, while the gentle blue ribbon that danced between their vocal cords vibrated in gentle harmony that Paul could see, clearly, with his own eyes.

But the strongest bond, the blood orange one, had filled Paul with a terrifying mixture of pain and pleasure. An almost erotic, sadistic feeling cascaded over him when he’d looked at the rope, or had reached his hand out to touch it. It hurt to look at, but he _needed_ to look; touching it had felt like torture, but he  _needed_ to touch it. When he’d moved, even an inch, it pulled on the very core of him, sending throbbing shockwaves from the pit of his stomach and down into the floor, and more than once he thought he might orgasm from the sensation. John seemed to have sensed it too, and they’d sat very still for a long moment, eyes locked on the fiery red braid that wouldn’t let them go.

Now, hours later, when Paul thought about the moment he could still feel the pull in his belly. 

“John?” he asked finally.

“Yeah.”

“Did you… did you see the colours?”

John was quiet for a long while before replying. “Yeah.”

“What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I mean, maybe we’re not supposed to know.”

“But it was so strong.”

“What was?”

Paul swallowed. “The orange one. Or the red one. I don’t know.”

Again, John was very quiet for a long moment. The living room filled again with the soft, soothing _hhhwach hhhwach hhhwach_ of the record player needle in the lead out, still spinning in the corner. Paul turned his head to look at John, laying there beside him, still staring at the ceiling. Longer hair and a more drawn visage had, at times, rendered John almost unrecognizable to Paul over the last few months. He hadn’t realised how much so until after the constant togetherness of touring and performing was gone and they began spending more time apart; their reunions would reveal a slightly different man to him every time. 

But after the intensity of the experience they’d just shared, Paul felt more connected to him than he had in years. He felt he could know what John was thinking if he simply touched his hand to the man’s forehead. It was electric.

Right then, in that moment, each second that John paused instead of answering Paul’s question provoked the intensity of Paul’s urge to do just that, to reach up and press his fingertips to the centre of John’s forehead. He almost lifted his hand to do it when John finally inhaled, preparing to speak.

“I think it was her,” he said finally. “The cord. The red one. I think it’s her.”

“Her?”

“You know who I mean.”

Paul turned his head, bringing his eyes back to the ceiling. 

Of course he knew what John meant. 

There was no one else it could be...

* * *

PAUL: We wanted more control over our image again. We’d always had photographers around on tour—as you remember, we’d almost hired Julia to come on the road with us once upon a time. But after nearly a year of no touring, with a new album on the horizon, we were having a tough time figuring out a way to do that. It wasn’t until we were almost ready to release _Pepper_ that we picked up the search a bit more seriously. It was mostly Brian’s idea. He had his people handle most of it. We didn’t really have any input. 

MURPHY: Why do you suppose that was? 

PAUL: ( _Pause_ ) I guess partly because we didn’t care who it was as long as they were good and weren't going to, you know, take our photos and sell them to the tabloids or something, but… well, looking back, I suppose it was one of those things, you know? Brian used to be the guy who booked us on tours or handled our appearances. When we stopped touring, he was… lost, I suppose. And maybe that wasn’t fair to him, but he would never have done differently, and he never complained. He was always about keeping the talent happy, you know? And we wanted a photographer, so he handled it, and we let him. Happily, I might add.

* * *

JOHN: Hiring a photographer couldn’t have been an easy task. It could never be a straightforward “Hi, want to come work for us? Oh, right, we’re The Beatles.” Never. It had to be done cloak-and-dagger-like, with fake names, covert. They couldn’t know that we were the ones asking for them because of course people get strange and maybe their fees would go up or something, you never know. Not that it mattered, we had the money. But it was the principle of it, according to Brian. ( _Pause_ ) He had his work cut out for him, but I think he liked it that way. Gave him something to do.

* * *

PAUL: There was this big stack of glossy eight-by-tens held together by elastics, that we went over in Brian’s office together one day, just the five of us, I think. 

MURPHY: What were you looking for?

PAUL: I don’t know. I think we just figured we’d know it when we saw it. I mean, you know, we didn’t want anyone really too old, and we weren’t keen on having a woman because we were worried about the way girls seemed to act around us, even if they weren’t fans. But really, we just wanted someone who showed us quality work.

MURPHY: So who did you end up hiring?

PAUL: This L.A.-based photographer named Levy… Adam Levy.

* * *

JOHN: I seem to remember his portfolio was full of really interesting photos—lots of colour and movement, real artistic stuff. There were a bunch of portraits of musicians or artists in these real hippie settings. So you know, lots of flowers and acoustic guitars and stuff. Laurel Canyon, palm trees, organic produce stands, big breasts. ( _Pause_ ) I liked his photos. We all did.

* * *

19 April 1967  
NEMS Enterprises  
Monmouth Street, London

The table was strewn with manila folders, piles of glossy 8x10s, index cards with names and addresses and typed CVs on onion skin paper. As the four of them walked into the room, John’s eyes moved about the table, taking in the sight. He was suddenly very glad that Paul had been voted down in his attempt to involve the group in the decision-making process a couple of weeks earlier. There was no way John could have handled being inundated with portfolios like this; as he caught Paul's eye, he saw that maybe 

Ringo let out a low whistle as he circled the table.

“The aftermath of Hurricane Kodachrome,” George said as he sank into a chair at one end of the table and began thumbing through the photos within arm’s reach.

Brian stopped him. “Don’t touch them,” he said. “These are organized.”

“They are?” George asked, surprise evident in his voice.

“You don’t expect us to choose someone from all this,” John asked, gesturing to the mess on the table.

“Of course not.”

Paul took a seat next to John. “So you’ve narrowed it down then?”

“We have,” Brian replied, reaching for three piles set slightly apart from the rest, neatly bound by elastics and binder clips. “An American, a Canadian, and a local chap. All very good. Young, obviously talented. Willing to relocate if necessary.” He held the three files in his hands. “I have my preference but it’s not up to me. You’ve got final say. But I’d like to have whoever you choose in place within the next two weeks if possible.”

“Let’s see ‘em,” John replied.

Brian handed John what he had in his hands; Ringo came to stand behind him, and George rolled his chair closer, peering over John’s shoulder to have a look. John, meanwhile cleared a space on the table in front of them, knocking over a pile of papers and eliciting a groan of consternation from their beleaguered manager in the process.

“Ronald Jones of Reading…” he set the folder on the table in front of him. “Michel Tremblay, hailing from the frozen Ottawa tundra,” Another folder down. “And Southern California’s own Adam Levy.”

The three others looked at the three files, each topped with an exemplar photo: a black and white image from an orchestral performance at the Royal Albert Hall, a composed portrait of Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, and a candid colour shot of young woman wearing a flower crown holding an orange to her nose. 

They couldn’t have been more different.

The first two portfolios contained ample evidence of accomplished photographic skills. They each featured a nice mix of staged and impromptu shots, all technically advanced, well-composed, interesting. English scenes: businessmen on a Tube station platform, a wedding portrait on a cobblestone street beside a churchyard, Mary Quant-skirted mods in Piccadilly Circus. Canadian scenes: an RCMP officer on a horse, a championship hockey team smiling after their big win, children in parkas next to a giant snowman in a red hat on an old Quebec street. Nothing to sneeze at, but nothing extraordinary.

The third—belonging to the Californian—was filled with prints that were colourful, vibrant, _alive_. That much was obvious to John immediately, and he wondered if the others felt the same. In one photo, women in bikinis lay on striped beach towels, bathed in sunlight, faces hidden behind huge sunglasses and floppy-brimmed hats; in another, a lineup of people at Pink’s, all tanned legs and shiny hair; in a third, the tallest palm trees next to hot black asphalt. There were photos of school-aged children at a beachside carnival, tourists on Hollywood Boulevard, bodybuilders in Venice Beach. At the end, there were the musicians: some older black and white images of The Beach Boys and Jan and Dean, followed by newer scenes featuring newer acts, clearly musicians, but not all of them people that John recognised. The Byrds, he knew; Buffalo Springfield, too. But he was only passingly familiar with Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek—the card taped to the back of that photo listed their names—pictured leaning against the wall outside the Whiskey a Go-Go.

Whether in colour or black and white, there was something about Adam Levy’s photos that struck John as _real_ in a way that the other two portfolios simply weren’t. There was an intimacy between the subject and the camera; where the other portraits were composed well enough and were nice to look at, they felt put-on, staged. Adam’s felt intimate, unguarded, as if the photographer had been invited to a private moment and depressed the shutter button just long enough to capture it, without anyone noticing, before anyone had a chance to put on airs. It was striking. 

“This is good,” John heard George say beside him.

Ringo reached a hand over John’s shoulder to take one of Adam’s photos from the pile in his hand. “I like this one,” he said.

John leaned back in his chair, leaving the photos on the table in front of him. On his right, Paul leaned over, his elbow on the armrest. 

“What do you think, Macca?”

Paul was chewing on his thumbnail. John saw his eyes passing over the photos visible in the pile, flicking from photo to photo as he considered. After a moment, he reached his hand out to grasp the top print—a woman with a flower tucked behind her ear, long blonde hair falling over the guitar in her lap as she strummed, a smile on her face. John couldn’t help but watch his bandmate as he pored over the image in his hand. His eyebrows lifted; he licked his lower lip, cocked his head to the side. Then he put the photo back on the table.

“Reminds me of…”

“Yeah,” John nodded, struck by the fact that he hadn’t clued in to it but also amazed that he knew with absolute certainty what Paul was referring to. A chill ran up his spine. He wondered if Paul had felt it too.

_It’s like looking through her eyes… as if she were the one who chose and framed and captured each image…_

Instead, Paul jabbed a finger out towards Adam’s portfolio. “Him,” he said.

Brian, who had been absolutely silent during the entire exchange, uncrossed his arms from his chest. “John?”

“One hundred percent of Beatles agree,” he said. “Call ‘im up, Eppy.”

Brian nodded, a smile on his face. “That was far easier than I expected,” he said.

“Who was it that you would’ve picked?” Ringo asked.

Brian nodded at Adam’s portfolio. “Mr. Levy. Without a doubt,” he said. “His work feels… _vital._ Like it’s capturing something important, profound.”

“I just like the tits,” John said, pointing to the bikini-clad sunbathers in the photo pile in front of him. “George, you don’t mind going topless do you?”

Brian concealed an eye roll; Ringo chuckled over John’s shoulder. Paul, for his part, revealed nothing of his inner state of mind. John covered his nerves with bluster and bravado and jokes about breasts; it’s what he’d always done. And he knew Paul well enough to know that he did the same in his own uniquely Paul-ish way. Was he doing that now? Was he was completely and totally shaken by what he’d seen in those photos? 

_Give me a sign, Paul._

At the last possible moment, Paul looked up, met John’s eyes, and John knew beyond a shadow of a doubt…

* * *

WILSON: So you hired this guy?

JOHN: Yeah. Him and his assistant. A package deal. We couldn’t have one without the other, but honestly, it didn’t matter much whether we had one or two, as long as everyone was happy. ( _Pause_ ) They were supposed to start the night of _Pepper_ release party at Brian’s place…

* * *

PAUL: I’ll never forget two things about that night. One, Linda was there; our second meeting. I fancied her something fierce, you know, so I was doing my admirable best to be as engrossed in our conversations as my rather limited attention span would allow. 

MURPHY: And the other thing?

PAUL: ( _Pause_ ) The colour of the dress Julia was wearing… 


	46. Life Flows On

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: "[Within You Without You/Tomorrow Never Knows](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utDKf7DYiiw)"

* * *

 

19 May 1967  
Chapel Street, London

The young man standing at the half-open bathroom window, a lit cigarette dangling from shaking fingertips, looked barely old enough to legally drive. His dark hair was close-cropped on the sides and a bit longer on top, too coarse and wavy to fashion in the moptop they’d made famous years earlier but styled in a soft, thick quiff that Paul would have admired as a youth. He was of average build, tall without being lanky, with black plastic glasses framing olive-green eyes, with the warmth of Southern California in his skin. 

His name was Adam Levy, and earlier that evening he’d arrived to his first paid gig as an international photographer to discover that he and his assistant had been hired by The Beatles. Hired, sight unseen, by a man with an impeccably upper crust English accent and without any idea who his clients-cum-employers were. Hired and flown around the world and driven to a posh home steps from the Palace and then, literally moments after arrival for what he'd quickly discovered was his make-or-break moment, his assistant had bolted from the scene entirely, leaving him adrift in a sea of journalists, DJs, and far more experienced photographers with vastly more credentials and far fewer anxiety disorders than him. He'd stammered and blubbered his way through a spontaneous tête-à-tête in the kitchen with Brian and John, who seemed to take the whole thing rather personally, before shutting up entirely and accepting the anger thrown his way and then disappearing up the stairs without advancing a single frame of film through his camera. 

Paul had sized him up and knew his number from the minute he first saw the younger man struggling to retain composure in the immediate aftermath of his partner's abrupt departure, and as much as he wanted answers about Julia he—ever the statesman, the PR guy—also felt duty-bound to reassure the photographer about his standing there. After all, his had been the only portfolio hand-picked by the four most famous people on the planet in their search for an on-the-payroll photographer. This was one reason why he’d ascended the stairs to the upper floor, where he found Adam in the bathroom, and had watched from the doorway for a long while, studying him, wondering how he—Adam Levy of Santa Monica, California—had managed to fit himself into the life of Julia Fitzpatrick, formerly of Speke, briefly of West Derby, then of central London for a spell, now of some place on the edge of the daylight... 

Julia, who had barrelled into Brian Epstein’s Belgravia home behind the young photographer, a tempest in paisley kaftan and cowboy boots, late to the release party and making up for it by whirling around in a blazing effort to secure equipment and prove her worth. 

Julia, who hadn’t noticed but who had  _ been  _ noticed. 

Julia, who had locked eyes with Paul and froze, mouth half-open around the sentence she’d been speaking. 

Julia, whose face drained of all colour before flushing red, from the jagged scar under her jaw to the rise of her cheekbone. 

Julia, who had bolted from the house without saying a word.

That already seemed like hours ago, a lifetime ago; like so many Julia-painted moments in Paul's life, he thought, he couldn't place it anywhere except in the foggy banks of memory from which most of his images of Julia were pulled these days. Of course, there was more to his seeking Adam out than simply being kind to a stranger. Paul wanted answers. But, stoned and trying to hide it, he wasn't even going to try to talk to John, or Brian; they, immersed in conversation in the kitchen still, would give him no gifts this night. He knew that.

Adam, however...? 

So here they were: Paul in the doorway and Adam at the bathroom window. It took a long time for him to realise he was being watched. W ith a startled gasp he blew out the smoke he’d been holding in his lungs with a long, nervous exhale and moved to stub out the cigarette with shaking fingers, though he only succeeded in dropping it on the floor. His blanched face began to glow, hotly embarrassed. 

“Sorry,” he stammered, his American voice flattened over the words as he bent to pick up the stub. “Jesus.”

“It’s okay,” Paul spoke, stepping into the room. “You should see what they’re smoking upstairs.”

Adam’s laugh was forced and jangly. Paul knew he’d put the kid on edge. “Well hell, I suppose if we’re gonna get fired anyway—”

“Why would we fire you?”

Adam shrugged, his shoulders still shaking. “Law of averages, I guess,” he said, his put-on voice calm and laid-back, typically Californian, despite his obvious nerves; it was almost the most admirable thing about him. He took a puff from the cigarette and exhaled it almost immediately. “Things have been going so well for us back home that it was bound to turn to shit eventually, right?”

Paul reached forward and motioned toward the cigarette; surprised, Adam handed it over, and watched as Paul took a long drag himself before passing it back.

“Of course there’s also the fact that we arrived late. And with Jules storming out of here like that…” Adam muttered, digging his thumb and forefinger into his eyes. “Shit.”

“Yeah, about that—”

The man was quick to explain. “Maybe she was just starstuck. She didn’t know it would be  _ you _ , though. Neither did I,” Adam glanced at the cigarette he held in his fingers and gave a snort as he handed the cigarette to Paul again. 

"Perhaps that's on us," Paul said as he took the cigarette. "Should've told you what you were in for."

Adam snickered. “Jesus," he muttered. "No one’d believe me if I told them: sharing a smoke with Paul McCartney in Brian Epstein’s bathroom…”

Paul had to laugh himself. “You know, it’s fine. Really. We’re not firing you,” he said, taking a drag from the cigarette as he considered what else he could say to comfort and reassure the anxious man beside him. “In fact—and this is embargoed news so I shouldn’t even be telling you this—but we’ve been asked to write a song for that global telecast next month. We’re working out the details now.” He passed the cigarette back to Adam. “Would I be telling you this if I didn’t think you’d still be employed by us when it comes time for the broadcast? I would assume that you’d want to be there to capture it.”

Adam’s eyes widened. “Well then,” he said. He took a drag of the cigarette. “I really thought you’d come up here to break the bad news.” 

“Nah,” Paul said, bottling his nerves. He was amazed that ten seconds in Julia’s presence could do this to him. He was almost afraid of the next time he’d see her.  _I'm not sure what I'd do..._  “I—I just wanted to know… about Julia…”

Paul wondered if the ruse would work, if he’d actually be able to pry loose the information he needed from the twitchy chap in front of him.  But Adam shook his head and flicked ash out the window. “What do you want to know?”

Paul swallowed hard against the lump in his throat. “How do you know her? What’s her story?”

Adam shook his head. “Oh, I don’t know. I hired her about a year and a half ago, straight off the boat, so to speak,” he attempted to clarify. “She was taking photos on the pier and there was something about her..." 

_Don't I know it..._

"She’d just moved to LA from here." Adam glanced up at Paul. "Did you know she was English? Is that why you hired us?”

_Yeah, of course I knew she was English_ , Paul thought, nearly nodding and giving away the entire game. Instead, he shook his head slowly. “No. No clue."

_ Of course... if I had known… if any of us had known…  _

Adam continued. “Well, she lives with my sister and me. Half sister, really, and she doesn’t really _live_ with us.” His face began to colour as he realised he had reached the point where he’d said more than would be considered polite and now couldn’t abandon the conversation at just having said that. He sighed. “Edith’s older. An English lit professor. Sort of. She tours around and does guest lectures for the most part, about poetry. I don't know, it's beyond me. But anyway, she has this place out on the coast and I live with her. Have done for a while. She lets me use her loft as a studio, so it works out real nice. Julia has a room there. Rents it. From my sister.” He took another drag from the cigarette. “As a team, we’re pretty good, Jules and I. Got a bit of a reputation back home for good work, good photos, that sort of thing.”

“So I gathered,” Paul said. “I mean, you don’t get hired by The Beatles if you’re terrible, right?” For all the emotion he felt flowing in and out of himself in that moment, the one that rose to the surface was intense satisfaction at seeing Julia on a sandy beach in his mind’s eye, her brown skin drinking the sun, smelling of coconuts and salt water… 

“I had to really convince her to take this job, though,” Adam said. “She didn’t want to come back.” He shrugged, as if replaying a distant conversation in his head, hoping for a different outcome than the one he’d originally received. “I don’t know why. Never asked.”

Paul was dying to ask the indelicate question that had been on his mind since the moment he saw the pair together but which he hadn’t found the courage yet to ask. Now, it seemed only too easy. 

“Are you two… you know?”

The photographer’s mouth dropped open and he uttered a few strangled, guttural noises before closing his mouth, and Paul immediately retracted the question; he had his answer anyway. 

“That’s fine. I didn’t mean to—”

Adam drew a shaky breath and puffed on the cigarette. “Julia’s great, but... well, I mean..." he gulped. "Haven’t you been trying to pick up that blonde photographer all night?”

Paul grinned, amused at the thought that he’d been watched as closely as the man he himself had been watching—hardly surprising, given Adam's profession. But his relationship status—especially the fact that he had, in fact, been getting quite cozy with Linda Eastman, the photographer in question, all evening—was not really a topic he felt comfortable discussing at any depth with a virtual stranger. With a cough that he hoped would punctuate the end of the conversation, Paul cocked his head out the door. 

“You know, most everyone’s gone upstairs. It’d be a good time to sneak out.”

Adam shrugged. “I can’t really. I mean, we just got here. Came straight from the airport. We haven’t even checked into the hotel. And I don’t know where Julia is.” He glanced at his watch and visibly deflated. “I don’t even know where I am… I really thought she’d come back by now.”

The idea hit Paul with such ferocity he literally felt like he’d been punched; he inhaled sharply in response, drawing a querying glance from Adam. Paul shook his head and cleared his throat.

“Fancy a quick tour of London, Mister Levy?”

“Whaddya mean?”

“Well, I might know where she’s gone.”

At the suggestion, Adam’s face brightened. “Are you serious?”

“Maybe,” Paul shrugged. He glanced down the hall, waiting for the din from upstairs to confirm that the hoard was still engaged and that the coast was, for now, more or less clear. Then he nodded. “Maybe, I might.”

Adam screwed up his face. “But… how? I mean… how could you possibly…?”

Paul stepped aside and made room for Adam to leave the bathroom. Peering into the front room, he saw that everyone was gone and his heart sank a little. Part of him had wished to see John, to catch his eyes and silently tell him about his plan; to have him agree to go, to jump at the chance to chase Julia once again. As it was, Paul tried to hide his disappointment.

“It’s a long story,” Paul said, reaching the phone in a few steps and calling for a car to pick them up at the front steps.


	47. This Can't Happen

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: "[Yes (Lullaby from Lost River)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWy0gic8TnQ)" / "[Houston](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WyXDqzD6u0)"

* * *

 

JOHN: It was like that line, you know, in  _ Casablanca _ . “Of all the gin joints in all the world”… We had hired a photographer based on a collection of photos in a portfolio, and he had accepted without knowing who we were, without us really knowing who he was. And he happened to bring along Julia as his assistant. And it wasn’t like before when we’d had time to get reacquainted, or at least come to terms with the idea of being in each other’s periphery again. It was a bloody good shock. I was beside myself. But we were good at putting on a show and not letting on that anything was the matter.

WILSON: What happened after?

JOHN: Well I took Brian aside and leaned into him real good, but he swore up and down he had no idea. He wasn’t upset himself, but I think he was taken aback by the fact that I was so upset. It was a mess, honestly. ( _ Pause _ ) Paul held it together reasonably well though I suppose he was always better at being the PR guy, so it helped that he’d practiced the façade of the emotionally uninvolved. ( _ Chuckle _ ) But I was pissed. 

WILSON: What did you do about it?

JOHN: The party was going to keep going no matter what, whether we were there or not. I don’t think anyone noticed that I’d left to be honest.

WILSON: Did you intend to find her?

JOHN: No, not really. I just wanted to get away from there and do some thinking. I walked around the corner—Brian lived in this posh neighbourhood, behind Buckingham Palace, yeah?—and there were all these white homes lining the street, and no people. I was angry. I was high. Just not thinking. I walked almost all the way to Knightsbridge before Mal caught up with me, in his car. He asked me where I was going, offered to drive me there. I didn’t have a plan. So I just told him: “Take me to Julia’s…”

* * *

19 May 1967  
Weymouth Mews

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Mal asked. 

John swore under his breath. “Don’t you fuckin’ start…”

Mal wrung his hands around the steering wheel and looked out the window at the mews house. John felt sorry for snapping at him.

“I’m just sayin’ is all,” Mal shrugged. “What if she’s not here?”

The thought had occurred to John but it wasn't until that moment that he really considered it. It had struck him out of nowhere, the idea that Julia might venture back to her former home; an older version of her, one that might only exist now in his mind, would have traversed these streets by muscle memory and wound up in the mews. That was his rationale. But it had been a year and a half since he last saw her. What right did he have to claim any knowledge of her now? 

Mal cleared his throat. “I’ll wait around until you’re done."

“No,” John said. “You go back to the party.”

“I can let them know where you are then?”

John wondered what kind of reaction that might provoke. Paul would be upset; Brian might have a stroke. Still, he figured someone ought to know. “Yeah,” he said. “Whatever you think is best.”

“I’ll wait until you’re inside anyway,” Mal said. “And then I’ll come back and get you.”

John nodded. “Right,” he said, suddenly grateful for the offer. He put his hand on the door, pushed it open, and stepped out into the mews.

He stalked across the cobblestones as though not a day had passed between this night and the last time he’d been here. Despite his drug-impaired state, his feet bore him to her doorstep, and with insistence in his fist, he knocked hard on the blue door, just as he’d done a thousand times before.

He didn’t quite know what to expect. A part of him was certain that the house had been sold—that Julia, from a million miles away, had worked out that particular real estate deal on her own as a silent and passive-aggressive “Fuck you” directed at him, the one who had purchased it for her in the first place; another part of him figured she’d sublet it, possibly to another struggling young woman, an artist maybe, or maybe just another call girl; yet another part of him wondered if it was empty. Actually expecting her to open the door was so far down on the list…  

But he was certainly surprised when the door opened wide and he saw not a stranger’s face but hers, staring back at him. She stood there hands on her hips, braided hair coming loose around her cheekbones and curling at her temples in the spring humidity. Her exasperation dripped from every syllable and dropped consonant as she sighed, turning her eyes heavenward. “Oh fer chrissakes—what the hell d'you want?”

His shock took a backseat to his intense amusement; here was no starstruck hanger-on. It was refreshing to be stripped down, to have someone so annoyed by the very sight of him that they couldn’t contain their contempt at his presence. John snorted and took a half step back before standing his ground. “I don’t know what this is all about, Julia.”

“ _ You  _ were the ones who asked me ‘ere!” she cried, wagging a finger in his face. “Don’t you forget tha’. I wouldn’t  _ be here  _ if you ’adn’t hired us!”

“We didn’t hire  _ you _ _!_ ” he spat. “We hired Adam Levy. Adam Levy, the photographer from Los Angeles, not Julia Fitz-fucking-patrick from bloody fuckin’ Liverpool!”

His words hit their mark, hard, and with the stinging rebuke, Julia softened. Her stance gave way and she lowered her hands from her hips, allowing the kaftan fabric to flutter gently around her knees, inches above the tops of her dusty and worn cowboy boots. John hadn’t noticed how much the last year and half had changed her. Her hair was long, wavier than he remembered, copper-toned and sun-bleached. It framed her bronzed face beautifully; no makeup needed to grace her cheekbones or eyelids or lips, which glowed with the heat of California in a way that John had never expected they could, all those years ago, under the ashen light of a Liverpool sky. He never would have pictured Julia wearing cowboy boots, that was for sure; but then again, he was positive she wouldn’t have pictured him with a sporran dangling from his hips, either.

“I deserved that,” she said softly. “But if yer gonna keep yellin’ maybe you should bring it inside, all right?”

“Is that legal?” John asked, taking a look at the darkened windows. “Is this even your place still?”

She shrugged. “Technically it’s the only place that’s  _ ever _ been mine—though you lot saw fit to turn it into somethin’ ugly, didn’t you?” she said before sighing. “That’s not fair either. It wasn’t entirely your fault. I’m sorry.” She turned and picked up her key from the table beside the door and showing it to him. “I didn’t break in, if that’s what you mean. Name’s still on the title.”

How they’d managed to go from screaming insults at each other to discussing property ownership John would never know, but as she stepped aside to let him pass, all he could smell was beach surf and coconut from her skin, and he struggled to stay angry. She closed the door behind him, and they were, for the first time in eighteen months, alone together.

John took a look around him at the sight inside. A lamp in the corner gave off the only light in the place aside from what filtered in from the street. Obviously no one had been in there since that night in December; a thin but noticeable layer of dust and grime covered every surface. He saw the furniture had been covered; the Christmas tree still stood in the corner, its ornaments dulled by dust but still hanging where she’d put them. Everything appeared exactly as they’d left it, untouched: a veritable time capsule.  

As he passed a dusty mirror hanging on the wall, John caught a glimpse of himself, his haggard and drawn visage reflected back at him in the grimy surface, he barely recognised himself; the first thing he did was swipe the ridiculous granny glasses off his nose and give his stiff mustache a scrub with the palm of his hand.  _ Yer a fuckin’ mess, Johnny…  _

“I can’t believe I remembered to bring my key with me,” she muttered, pocketing her key. “On the off chance that we’d need some place to stay…”

“What do you mean we turned it into something ugly?” he asked.

Julia looked at him, her hand still resting on the key sitting on the hall table by the door. “I mean… what was happy about it?”

John felt his breath leave his lungs.  _ What was happy about it? _ he wondered. Playing records in the spare room until all hours of the morning. Guitars on the roof, singing to the star blanket above their heads. Games of Monopoly in the front room. Lovemaking and handholding and dream-building in the house he’d bought for her.

He had so many happy memories here. Didn’t she?

Angrily, he shook his head. “Was it worth it? Leavin’ like that?” John asked. “With nothin' but that bloody book…”

“What would you ‘ave me do?” she asked. “I couldn’t stay ‘ere with you, and I couldn’t go away with Paul. And I couldn’t keep getting in the middle between you, either.”

“You could’ve talked to us.”

“Really?” she asked. He looked up at her, took in the seriousness on her face, and realised that she was right: he remembered all too well the emotions he’d felt and the way it had gutted him, day after day, to know that she was never going to be fully his. There was no way that rational conversation would have solved the problem.

He shrugged, unwilling to concede, and waved a hand around him. “I don’t see the point of running away, Julia. I honestly don’t.”

“I do,” she admitted. “I’ve moved on. I live in a great big ‘ouse on the edge of the world, John. I get paid t’ take photographs fer a living,” she trailed off, flicking the tip of her tongue over her lip and sighing. “All in all, I’d say it was a good trade up.”

She paused, and he saw her uncross her arms from atop her breasts before crossing them again. John struggled to hide his hurt; he’d been bested by an ocean view and couple of palm trees. A part of him stung. 

“Besides,” she said. “You don’t seem to be doing too badly, either.”

“Well,” John rose up, defensive. “Yeah, as a matter of fact, we’re doing pretty damn well. And no thanks to you.”

She smiled, but it wasn’t sincere, and it wasn’t happy, and John’s heart cleaved in two. “I knew it, the minute I left. I knew you’d be okay.” She toed a warped wood floorboard with the tip of that damn cowboy boot and nodded. “Yeah, I knew you’d be okay.”

John watched her lean back against the wall, her hands clasped in her lower back, ankles crossed in front of her, and all John could see was the girl he’d first fallen for in Liverpool, in her layers of wool, watching him and his mates, an outsider longing to be in.  And here she was, as ‘in’ as one could be. 

She looked at him for a moment before turning her eyes to the window, and in profile he saw the long scar, a thin line that never tanned running along her jaw; suddenly, it made no difference why they were where they were or how they’d gotten there; it only mattered that  _ there they were _ , the two of them, separated by their pride and kismet, yes, but also by handful of footsteps and a lungful of air, a simplistically beautiful distance.

He made the decision in a heartbeat, his muscles moving his arms and legs before the rest of him had caught up, and in an instant he had crossed the living room and captured Julia against the wall behind her, crashing his mouth down on hers. The surprise he felt when she kissed him back was palpable; he almost gasped, pulling away for a moment and catching the look in her eye—a heady, lustful gaze. He scooped a hand around her back, grabbing a fistful of her hair in the process and tugging it down, lifting her face to his in the process.

“John…” she whimpered as he kissed her again, and she threw her arms around his shoulders as he lifted her up, pressing her between the wall behind her and his body. She swung her legs around his hips, drawing him closer. John released a hand, dropping it to her breast as he broke from her lips and started on her neck, kissing and biting along the base near her collarbone; his hand fell south, and he tore the fabric of her kaftan to gain the access he needed, sliding aside her thin panties; she cried out John pushed one, then two, then three fingers deep within her.

He worked them furiously, curling and pumping in time with the thrusts she made with her hips toward his. Julia’s breathing became ragged, and she alternately gripped his hair and the collar of his jacket or reached up the wall to find something—anything—to grab hold of. His mind swam, LSD combined with electric eroticism, as he sought to bring her closer and closer to her climax. He pushed her body tighter to the wall, grinding the heel of his hand against the juncture of her thighs, and she began to cry out; he silenced her with a kiss, violent and heavy, a melange of tongues and teeth and saliva-slicked lips; still she cried, the sound muffled within their joined mouths, and as he pressed the kiss further, her hips bucked twice and he felt her coming hard and fast against his palm.

He held here there, tight against the wall, for a long moment while the waves of her orgasm subsided and her legs stopped quaking, joined at the mouth, his hand still buried within her. In the rush and carnality of the moment, John had felt himself come so close to finishing but now that it was over, his own desire melted away into the floorboards. He wasn’t upset; on the contrary, he felt pleased with himself. He’d gotten most of what he’d wanted, anyway.

John eased up and Julia slumped, her eyelids heavy as she leaned her head back against the wall. John kissed her neck again, sliding his other hand around the small of her back. Carefully, slowly, he pulled his hand away, then cupped her under her backside to hold her steady; she shuddered against him.

“Jesus,” he croaked, resting his lips against her collarbone. She wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face against the soft fur of his jacket collar, inhaling deeply and holding him close.

She’d locked her ankles behind his back, but now she freed them, and he slowly let her fall to the floor again, where they stood, pressed against the wall and tight in each other’s arms, for what seemed like an eternity.

“Christ, Julia,” he whispered against her hair.

“Oh John,” she murmured. “What are we doing?”

“That was a good finger fucking, if I’m not mistaken…”

He could hear her grin. “You know what I mean…”

He clasped her to his chest, feeling waves of a kind of tenderness he hadn’t felt in months wash over him. He could have died there, and it would have been a blissful death.

“Don’t say there was nothing happy here,” he murmured against her. "You know there was. You  _know_ there was…"

“I know,” she replied, stepping back from his embrace. She held her hands in front of her stomach, worrying her fingers against and around and between one another. “So much has happened… there’s so much to say—” 

“Then say it, Julia,” he urged. “Fuckin’  _ say it _ . Now, not later.”

Julia opened her mouth to speak but obviously thought better of it for a moment. With her eyes closed, she let out a breath. Then she lifted her hands, lifted them to within her eyesight, lifted them and began to examine them as if she’d never seen them before. With gentle touch, she caressed her own fingertips; John watched as she ran her thumb along the pad of each finger, pinky to index and back again. She smiled

“You live here," she said. "In my skin. You live within me every day. You’re such a part of who I am. You… and Paul…”

He didn’t even flinch at the sound of Paul’s name. Her hand found the side of his face, and he leaned, hungry, into her touch.

“… _Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse_ …” she stroked his cheek. 

He squinted at her. "That's daft is what that is."  


Julia stroked his collar. "It's what Mr. Duffy wrote."

"Who?"

"In that _bloody book_ I left you, John," she told him with a sigh that suggested her displeasure. "This can’t happen. Not again…”

He wanted to protest. He wanted to shout. He wanted to shake her and ask her why there was always something stopping what was surely the straightest avenue to their continued happiness. But the moment was interrupted by the sound of a car door slamming shut outside and voices approaching outside. 

Julia gasped. “Fuck,” she said, pressing her hands to the front of his deep green shirt. He took the hint and stepped back, freeing her from his embrace, but she closed the gap again to straighten his collar for him, running her hands across his shirt front along the lines of his shoulders; he returned the favour, smoothing her mussed-up hair, gently letting his hands rest there and drinking in the slight smile she gave him as he did. When the sound of the door knocker cut through the air, she pressed her hands to her cheeks and fanned cool air over her face, steadying herself, before she peeked through the glass to see who was there.

“Oh my god…” was all she said.

“What?” John asked.

“It’s Paul.”

_ Of fucking course _ , John thought, his heart sinking. He silently urged her not to open the door, but she whispered back to him that Adam, her boss and partner, was with him. “I have to explain,” she said, and with one last, determined sigh, she gripped the door handle and pulled it open. 

John watched as Paul’s face turned from convivial to shocked in the span of a heartbeat. His friend’s eyes took in the sight of Julia, of John standing just behind her, as he registered the same emotions and disbelief that John had upon realizing that his hunch about Julia’s whereabouts that day had been proved right. 

Once again, John felt obliged to acknowledge that Paul knew Julia just as well as he did himself.

“Julia!” Adam cried.

Julia grinned. “Found me.”

“Fuck!” he said. “I don’t even know where to begin!”

“I suppose we could start with them,” Julia said.

Adam spread his arms out wide, his incredulity painted broadly on his face. “Why the hell not?!”

Julia prattled on, telling the story from the very beginning, about growing up in Liverpool and meeting this band; in the midst of it all, Paul and John locked eyes. It wasn’t like John to avert someone’s gaze, but in that moment, it was all he could do to hold Paul’s. The way he stared at him was more than discomfiting; it was accusatory and hurt and angry and sad all at once. In a single moment, John knew that Paul knew, and that another line had most definitely been crossed. John had felt that, after their twinned trip earlier that spring, they’d perhaps reached a point—call it a plateau, or a peak, or whatever-the-hell either of them wanted to—in their mutual understanding of Julia and her place in their lives. But seeing Paul looking at him then, John wondered if he’d read it all wrong after all.  

In the end it was Paul whose eyes drew away first, as he focused on Julia and took in the sight of her, the way John had not half an hour before.

“Look,” Adam said, “You’re going to have to start from the beginning again, because you’ve lost me. Entirely.” He threw his hands into the air. “I have no idea how I ended up standing on a stoop in front of a house in Central London that you  _ apparently own _ , alongside not one but  _ two  _ Beatles whom you tell me you’ve been friends with since you were a teenager. All I know is I’m hungry and tired, and I’ve flown half way around the world for a gig that you walked out of, and—”

Julia laughed and nodded. “We should get a hotel for the night. And find some food. You’re absolutely right.”

“Can they join us?” Adam asked, his voice sheepish and small in the vastness of the mews.

Julia giggled. “You know, Adam, it’s probably best if we keep to ourselves, so I can explain everything. We can meet up with them later, okay?”

John wasn’t paying any attention to it. Paul was struggling to keep up, to piece together the scraps of information that Julia had alluded to. John knew he’d have explaining to do to catch the bassist up.

“John?” Julia said, calling his attention back to the conversation. “Paul? I would really love to reconnect. We’ll need to rearrange this whole thing if we’re to honour the contract, and I think that’s what would be in everyone’s best interest. I should think we’d have plenty of time for catching up later, wouldn’t you say?”

John nodded, and Paul nodded, and Adam gaped. Julia fished her keys out of a low pocket on her kaftan—next to the long tear in the seam that John had caused earlier, and which she now tried to hold close as best she could without looking like it—and ushered them out of the flat, locking the door behind her. They stood on the stoop, eyeing the length of the mews warily as the headlights of Paul’s Mini lit up the cobbled street. A light rain had begun to fall, and Julia shivered inside her thin garment. 

John and Paul both moved to shrug off their coats but it was Adam who beat them to it, not even noticing that he’d been locked in that particular battle. It was a stinging reminder that they were now but two of three men taking up space in Julia’s life in that moment.

Julia was chipper and bright, a sharp contrast to the sadness John had seen earlier, as she first walked Paul to his car. They broke away from the group for a moment, and John’s intense jealousy reared up as she kissed Paul’s cheek and whispered confidences in the space between them. Paul had nodded, accepted whatever it was she proffered. He said goodbye to Adam and waved to John before climbing into the driver’s seat, but it was half-hearted at best.

Julia approached him just as Mal’s car entered the narrow alleyway behind Paul’s. Julia used the distraction to her advantage; she stood up on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek, lingering there a moment as she gripped his wrist with her hand. Adam stood a respectable distance away, inside a recessed doorway that provided some shelter from the rain.

“This can’t happen, John,” she whispered, repeating herself.

Gutted, John almost audibly groaned. “Is that what you told Paul?”

She scowled at him “Don’t,” she warned. “You know that I’m right. Let’s not make it worse by pretending otherwise.”

Desperate to hold on to her, John scrambled for anything to say. “Let me give you a ride. Somewhere. Anywhere.”

“No,” she said. “Adam and I, we’ll manage.”

John looked over Julia’s shoulder at her photography partner. The other man was eyeing him intently. But he had no time to parse Adam’s apparent suspicion of him; he lifted his chin, staring down his nose at a spot on the cobbles behind Julia.

“But your things are still at Brian’s.”

“We’ll arrange to have them sent around,” she told him.

“When will I see you again.” His voice was as conspiratorially low as hers, with the subtext glaring at her from between his words.

She nodded. “You will, don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll be here, John. I’m not going anywhere. Not for a while. Okay?”

Then she let go of his hand—he hadn’t even noticed she’d been holding it—and walked back toward Adam. Sensing there was nothing else to do, John turned and walked back to where Mal sat, still idling behind Paul’s Mini. 

“How’d it go?” Mal asked.

“Could’ve gone worse,” John answered. He was being truthful; it was also true that he felt gutted by the whole affair. But he wasn’t able to be honest, not now. Later, maybe. For now, he watched as Adam and Julia headed out of the mews, where they’d find a taxi, and head to a hotel together. He couldn’t believe how jealous he was of the American; he’d had Julia, literally, up against a wall not fifteen minutes earlier, and yet he burned at the thought of her going off with this other man. He watched until he could no longer see her, as she turned a corner and left his sight.

It was then that he saw Paul step out of his car. He groaned and shut his eyes, trying to think of what to say.

Mal reached for the door handle. “You two need a bit of privacy?” he asked.

John nodded slightly, and Mal let himself out, and Paul slid in, taking over the driver’s seat on John’s right. When the door shut and silence invaded the cab, John listened to the rain on the roof of the car, now a steady thrum. Several seconds passed like this before Paul took a breath and spoke.

“I don’t know what to make of any of this.”

“Me neither.”

“What did she say to you?”

John scrambled to his senses. “That she’d arrange for their things to be picked up from Brian’s.”

Paul nodded. “Same ‘ere,” he shook his head. “What a fuckin’ night.”

_ Yer tellin’ me…  _ John thought.

“Where’re yer glasses?” Paul asked.

John blanched as his hand flew to his sporran. He flicked them out, their shiny metal framed glinting in the pale light. “She ribbed me for wearin’ ‘em,” he lied.

Paul grinned. “Sounds about right.”

John slid the glasses back on his face. “What should we do then?”

Paul shrugged. “Nothing, I guess.”

“Nothing,” John nodded. “I’m good at doin’ nothing.”

“I reckon,” Paul replied.

John was more than relieved that the conversation hadn’t turned to fisticuffs again. He hazarded a small smile. “California suits ‘er, don’tcha think?”

Paul was contemplative; he rested his elbow on the window ledge, his thumbnail caught between his teeth as he chewed at its frayed edge. “Never would’ve thought it possible that she’d wind up there.”

“She’s thrown us more than a few curveballs, Macca,” John reminded him. “We can’t rule anything out, not ever.”

Paul shrugged, throwing on a southern American accent for a lark as he clapped a hand on John’s shoulder. “Ain’t that the truth!”

John laughed, and Paul laughed, but there wasn’t much mirth to be found in the sound. They said their goodbyes and parted ways, eager for the night to be over. Eventually, their cars pulled away from Julia’s blue door, but diverged shortly after, Paul’s headed for his nearby home and John for the suburban quiet of Kenwood. 

* * *

WILSON: What were your expectations for this time around? 

JOHN: I didn’t have any, to be honest. ( _ Pause _ ) But of course that’s a lie. I expected it all. I wanted everything…


	48. You Can Learn How to Play the Game, It's Easy

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: "[All You Need Is Love](https://vimeo.com/262481000)"

* * *

 PAUL: We stuck to that, for a while. The doing nothing part. But it wasn’t for lack of trying; more a lack of opportunity. At least for me. I was really after Brian, trying to drum up reasons to need a photographer so that we’d see her again. John had just had his Rolls painted, so it was “Cor, we should get a picture of that!” Or the lot of us were going out to see Jimi Hendrix: “Yeah! Let’s bring our photographer!” And every time we called Adam in, he would be the one that showed up, which I guess made sense—he was the photographer, right? Julia was the assistant—so Julia was never with him. And sure, there were times when he didn’t need an assistant, but… well, then there was the Our World telecast…

 

* * *

JOHN: They’d asked us to write a song for this specifically. But there was a certain apprehension about this event. We weren’t all happy that Brian had agreed to it in the first place but the deal was done and we had to come up with something. And I mean, we’d written under pressure before but something like half a billion people were going to be watching. That’s gonna shrivel anyone’s dick a bit, you know? ( _Pause_ ) I think Paul put forward “Your Mother Should Know” but they wanted something about peace and love and the harmony that they were trying to forge with this global broadcast. Unite the world, that kind of thing. So in the end Brian selected my song over Paul’s. This simple song, simple message: all you need is love. Which, really, when you think about it, maybe it’s trite but it’s a beautiful sentiment. It all boils down to love, every time. If it doesn’t, what’s the point?

* * *

25 June 1967   
EMI Studios, Abbey Road 

John idly glanced at the monitor playing the BBC live feed of the Our World telecast. A cattle farmer from somewhere in the Canadian prairies was in the process of cutting out his herd. John tuned his guitar, absently, pointlessly; they were going to be playing to a pre-recorded track, and the instruments were just there for show. Still, he needed something to do with his hands, somewhere to focus his attention, as Studio 2 filled up and their peers began to gather around for the broadcast.

As Julia and Adam planned out their shot list in the far corner, behind the placards, surrounded by flowers…

John plucked his D string and honed in on the voice coming from the speakers of the small TV he was only half-watching. The announcer droned on, in perfectly-unaccented Canadian English, while the image of a cowboy and his horse darted across the screen, attempting to catch a steer.

_“…the breeding and training of these remarkable horses. A cutting horse is a highly trained specialist who works through a pattern of movement as intricate as the ballet. Today, because of the requirements of the cattlemen…”_

John became strangely aware of Paul’s presence filling the space on his left, and for a moment he wondered exactly how he could know that. Was it the scent of Paul's aftershave? The particular rhythm of his gait, shoes muffled on the ornate rugs strewn over the floor? But as he turned to look at his bandmate, John realized that, after ten years together, it would have been stranger still if he  _couldn't_ tell it was Paul. 

“Home, home on the range,” Paul crooned in a thick Texan accent. “Where the deer and the antelope play…”

“Are there antelope in America?”

Paul shrugged. “How should I know?”

“They didn’t cover that in A-level geography?”

Paul pulled a face, which John returned. The image on the screen shifted from the Ghost Lake, Alberta ranch to the warm sandy beaches of Vancouver on the Pacific coast. Paul sighed.

“Shame this isn’t going to be in colour,” he said, his eyes transfixed by the image of sunbathers. The voiceover narration described crystal clear blue waters and sunny summer skies above the Kitsilano and Vancouver Yacht Club, but the monotone greys belied none of that. 

John looked around him at the room in which he stood, filled with fragrant flowers, balloons, brightly coloured placards and sandwich boards proclaiming the theme of the day—love, love, and more love. The people within were bedecked in the most colourful patterns. John was certain there’d never been this much vibrancy in this room before, ever.

Paul saw where John was looking and nodded. “This too. Such a shame.”

John snickered. “Not everyone can afford colour TVs, Macca, you know that, right?”

Paul laughed. “S’pose not.”

At that moment, John’s hackles raised; he felt someone approaching behind them, and yet again he was struck by the notion that he knew who it was; that same decade long sixth sense kicked into gear. The back of his neck tingled. But he didn't dare turn around; that task fell to Paul. 

“Oh, Adam,” Paul said. Then, after a pause and in a slightly changed, softer voice that John could hear but perhaps no one else would pick up on, John's suspicions were confirmed. 

“Julia.”

John suppressed a groan, feeling his stomach pit as he turned to face them. Seeing her closeup now, for the first time in weeks, he felt an ease creep into his chest. Breath came  _easily_ ; his heart beat _easily_. He may have even felt himself start to smile, and now he understood what Paul had been getting at about the black and white broadcast; it seemed a cruel and terrible joke that Julia—standing there like an oil projection image captured in still life, in a cotton dress, purple and yellow and green beaded kimono, her long brown hair streaked with caramel and stuck all over with daisies—should be captured in monochrome. 

 _She should be painted in rainbows, a kaleidoscope of colour, just the way I see her now.._ _._

Adam thrust the shot list into the void between them. “Just wanted to go over our plan one last time,” he said. “With Julia here we can cover more ground…”

Paul took the sheet and pored over the list with eager eyes. John couldn't see the list from where he stood, but Paul's muttered _Hmms_ were enough to tell John that Paul was pleased with what he saw.

“…So if there’s something else you want us to look for…”

Paul ran a fingertip along the list as he went over it a second time before answering. “Is this all you're planning?"

John saw Adam shake his head, slightly pale as he swallowed and thought of how to respond. "Well, like I said, we've got two cameras tonight, so w-we can get some more candid photos along with these... these more  _composed_ ones, I guess. Yeah."

That Paul would have made Adam nervous was amusing to John; the poor chap looked about ready to dissolve into the floor, and all Paul had done was question the number of shots he'd planned on taking that night. That he would be standing next to Julia—Julia who had no trouble giving any of them what for, who contained enough gumption and mettle to propel her to wherever she needed to be, _clearly_ —seemed like such a massive incongruence, a cosmic joke. John wanted to smirk, but another part of him began to roil.

Paul handed the shot list to John. “Great! Yeah, be spontaneous. See what catches your eye.”

“That’s what I have Julia for,” Adam muttered, a little sheepishly, looking over at her. "She's remarkably talented."

The look John caught between the two of them, the shock of it, that attraction— _No… admiration? Affection, surely…_ he thought—whatever that was that sparked between them made John’s insides twist. He'd had scarcely five minutes with Adam and Julia together since the _Sgt. Pepper_ party, but whatever existed between the two of them was more than just a simple working partnership. He felt like a voyeur, peeking through someone's bedroom window. The jealousy rose another notch within him. 

“She’s always been good at that,” Adam continued. “Off-the-cuff. A striking, singular eye for what makes a great photo. I’ve never met anyone quite like her.”

 _Join the queue_ , John thought as he finally looked down at the list in his hand. The penmanship was unmistakably hers, flowing inelegantly from her hand but firm and unbroken, with nothing crossed out; it had always been like that, as if no idea that ever existed in her head could traverse the length of her arm to the page without exiting, fully formed, from the tip of her pen. His eyes danced about the page as he took in the list of shots that sat pre-destined for that expert eye Adam had mentioned: “ _Individual portraits - multiple_ ”, “ _3/4 profile x4_ ”, “ _Ringo + drum kit_ ”, “ _Wide shot - Beatles + placards_ ”. Mundane images, but images which would shine if Julia were the one to frame them.

But it was the sight of his name—and his name was all over the page, messily scrawled in blue-black ink, virtually the same every time it appeared—that held his attention longest. A bold downward stroke on the “J”, topped with a firm line, left to right… a looping “o” conjoined to the upward stroke of the “h”… the gentle, even roundness in the twinned slopes of the “n”. John could hear her voice as he read her words, and realised that Julia spoke his name as if the word itself, uttered from her lips, were in cursive. Julia thought in cursive. She lived in cursive. She _was_ cursive.

_Working through a pattern of movement as intricate as the ballet…_

John looked up at her and, though Adam and Paul were deep in conversation—discussing the finer points of the TV camera lighting set up and how that might alternately washout or cast deep shadows around the scene—he saw that she was looking at him.

“Do you approve?” she asked.

He nodded and handed her the list. “There’s only one shot missing,” he said.

“Oh?”

He took the plunge. “I want one of you,” he said quietly. 

Julia blushed. “John,” she mouthed, shaking her head slowly. 

He smirked at her, under the cover of the noise in the room and the quiet understanding that existed between the two of them, there in the shadow of her boss and his best friend; John felt as though they were alone in a sea of people. But even if that weren't the case, he honestly no longer cared if anyone saw them.

“Ninety minutes,” someone yelled from across the room, and a minor cheer went up through the assembled crowd. More people bustled in through the studio door. Somewhere in the back, three brass players began to rehearse the opening to “La Marseillaise”. 

“We’d better finish setting up,” Adam said. 

Julia turned and smiled at John and Paul both. One of the daisies loosely tucked into the kinked and waved strands of her long hair fell loose. They all stopped to watch it fall to the carpet, but it was Paul who picked it up.

“Careful, love,” he said as he affixed the stem once more, tucking it behind her ear for good measure.

Julia smiled. “Jane spent nearly fifteen minutes putting these in,” she said.

At the mention of his girlfriend’s name, Paul’s hand fell away from Julia's face. “Did she?”

She nodded, carefully, and then spun around, as if suddenly looking for something; John half-wondered if she was going to call Jane over herself, and privately hoped that the subtle humiliation of Paul sandwiched between these two women would play out in front of his eyes the way he imagined it would. But instead, Julia grabbed two stems from an arrangement on the floor behind her. “I suppose I can return the favour,” she said as pinched off the stem and gently, with great care and devotion, pushed it into place behind Paul’s ear. Then she did the same for John. 

Before either of them knew it, she was gone, leaving a trail of sandalwood-scented air in her wake.

“What a fuckin’ trip,” John murmured.

Paul half snorted. “You can say that again.”

It was the last word either of them spoke on the subject for a while.

* * *

_“There's nothing you can do that can't be done_   
_Nothing you can sing that can't be sung_   
_Nothing you can say, but you can learn how to play the game  
It's easy…”_

John leaned back from the mic as the music continued to play in his headphones, which he crooked off one ear. “Can I try that one again?”

Up in the booth he saw a thumbs up. In his ear, he heard the backing track stop, followed by a brief silence before it began again. He readied himself to sing. 

The decision to re-record his vocals for the record single had been his; he hadn’t liked the way it sounded live, and no one fought him on the decision to stay behind. George and Ringo had gone home; only Paul remained, up in the booth, the owner of the thumb that John had seen through the window.

When all was said and done, this was the part he liked most: working with Paul. Sure, there were EMI staff there, engineers and techs milling about. But it didn't matter. For all intents and purposes, this was John and Paul, Lennon and McCartney, and they were running the show, which is how John would have it—every day and twice on Sundays—if he could have his way.

Perhaps it _was_ best if Julia didn’t enter into it.

But then he remembered the way she smiled… the scent of her on his skin… the way her taste lingered with him for hours and hours…

“John?” he heard Paul’s voice in his ears. “You missed your entrance.”

John groaned and stepped back from the mic, shaking his head. “Sorry.”

“I think we’ve got it, though.”

“I don’t think so,” John replied. “I’m not happy.”

“Since when has that stopped us from issuing a recording?”

John scoffed. “I’ll come up and 'ave a listen.”

He took the headphones off his head, dislodging the flower that Julia had pinned behind his ear hours earlier; he’d forgotten it was there. He bent over and picked it up off the floor with reverent fingers. If he was being truthful, the reason he’d been so unable to concentrate all night, the reason he hadn’t liked his vocals, the reason he was redoing things until—he checked his watch—nearly one in the morning… it was all because of her. Watching her work, her camera around her neck, crouching and kneeling and peeking, never in the way, always out of the view of the television cameras no matter where they were, had been thrilling, as it always was. He'd had the same feeling in Paris, watching her assemble and frame and bounce from scene to scene at the speed of her shutterclick; he'd marveled at it then, the patience she displayed, but again on the soundstage at Twickenham, when they'd been filming  _Help!_ , and he'd watched her do the same thing all over again—patiently waiting, setting it up,  _click click click_ , always with a smile on her face. It had stirred something in him then, more than before, but not as much as tonight. This time was different somehow. 

The way she ignored him, completely... that was what really had him enthralled. No matter how many times he'd tried to catch her eye, grab her attention, she never bit. Her focus was absolute, her professionalism unwavering. It was clear she had grown tremendously since they'd last spent any time together. But even apart from that, he had this feeling that he was on the periphery of her awareness, and that hadn't been the case, not really, since they were teenagers back in Liverpool, when she was pretending not to like him and he was pretending not to like her, and they were both failing miserably. Tonight, he had the distinct impression that she really  _didn't_ like him, and rather than being a turn-off, he felt more persistent than ever. Maybe she wasn't going to come away as easily as he thought.

 _Maybe that's for the_ better, John thought as he cast a glance up at the booth again. If things with Julia went anywhere, it felt like there _was_ going to be a choice made... and it was going to be on him to make it.

Between Paul and Julia, he didn't know what he'd do.

John slipped his headphones off his head and set them down, then took another look about the room. The words to the song he'd been singing still danced in his head—they'd be impossible to dislodge, he knew that much—and as he began wrapping up the cords, he looked to the spot on the floor in front of him where Julia and Adam had been standing, cameras still for one blissful moment, when she had broken her stoicism, and he'd watched her lips, her mouth, forming the words and singing along to the song he’d written.

 _All you need is love_ …

He’d been distracted because he was singing, and she was singing, and the words were his and—in some strange and roundabout way—they were meant for her.

_No one you can save that can't be saved… nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time… nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be…_

And now, he realised, it was about him as much as it was about her.

_Make the best of this John…_

A knock at the door called John’s attention briefly. Annoyance bristled along his shoulders—no one should be bothering them, not now, and not with the recording light was on—but as John looked up to the light then he realised that it actually wasn’t on, that Paul must have flipped it off when John agreed to listen to the track as it was. His annoyance at the interruption became He walked to the door, there beside the stairs, and pushed it open to peer out into the hallway beyond. 

It was Julia. A broad, genuine smile cut a wide swath across her face as she handed him an envelope. “Sorry to barge in. I saw the cars out front…”

John took the envelope. “What are you doing here?”

“Aren’t you happy to see me?”

He was, and he told her so. “Overjoyed.”

She nodded to the folder. “I brought you something?”

“What is it?”

“Find out,” she told him as she stepped back in the hall, towards the front of the building. 

“Yer not leavin’ are you?”

Julia seemed to waver. “No, I’m not leaving.” A look crossed her face— _fear? worry?_ —and she shook her head. “What _am_ I doing here?” she whispered. She shut her eyes and chewed on her lower lip, and John watched as her mouth began moving noiselessly, whispering words the way she she’d done before, in all those moments when her anxieties about a given situation got the better of her. If he’d been able to hear them, he would have bet good money on the wager that her words were French, or Joycean, or both. 

“What are you so worried about, Julia?”

When she finally lifted her eyes to his, he found a certainty and strength there that he’d never seen before. She smiled at him. 

“You,” she said softly.

With that, she turned and walked away, the sound of her footfalls receding from him. Unable to contain his curiosity, he opened the envelope. Inside was a glossy 8 x 10, a self-portrait, another one taken in the mirror—he recognised the mirror as the one that hung in her home, the mews house. But unlike that earlier mirrored self-portrait, which hung on a wall in the Walker Art Gallery all those years before, this one was not timid, was not hesitant; she stood square to the plane of the image, shoulders back and head high, staring directly into the camera lens; the camera itself hung around her neck, dangling against her stomach. She wore the clothes she had been wearing that night. John knew she’d gone straight home to take it, just for him, and had developed it—he could only hope—in the dark room he had always wished she would build for herself on the second floor of her home.

On the back she’d scrawled the title: _Navelgazing._

He smiled and slipped the photo back into the envelope. Brightly coloured, full of life, it was the first image of Julia that John had ever received; he handled it as a priest might hold the Shroud of Turin.

“Who was that?” he heard Paul’s voice behind him.

He set the envelope down beside the door. “No one,” he lied. “Someone wondering when they could lock up.”

Paul shrugged. “It’s up to you,” he said. "If you think we're done."

John returned the shrug. “I’m tired,” he said. “I think we’ve got it.”

“Good,” Paul said around a yawn. “You want to come back to mine?”

John nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Gimme a lift?”

Paul laughed. “Do I have a choice?”

He went back up to power down the studio and relieve the overworked sound engineers who had stayed to work on John’s vanity project. John hid the envelope underneath the pale blue coat he’d been wearing, now slung over his arm.

“ _I’m not leaving…”_

John could only hope her words were true.

* * *

JOHN: "All you need is love." That might be my favourite of all the lyrics I ever wrote. The truest. ( _Pause_ ) And for a moment, I believed them, too. That maybe love was all that was needed to get through. But Julia—one minute she’s sending you photos and the next she’s picking up where she left off with your best friend… 


	49. Under Athenian Skies

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: "[Aegina Airlines](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-6H0DOujx8)" / "[Manoula Mou](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YdQ4sTAYzI)"

* * *

 

PAUL: As I said, we didn't see a lot of Julia that summer, up until July really, so I didn't have the opportunity to talk to her or suss out her thoughts on the whole things, you know, between us, between her and John.

MURPHY: You were after reconciliation? 

PAUL: Not exactly. I don’t know what I was after to be honest. A halfways decent conversation, I suppose. Friendship. I would have settled for just one smile from her if I knew it would be genuine… ( _trailing off_ ) But that was the thing: I didn't know, honestly, if it would be. If it even could be. 

MURPHY: Did you ever get it?

PAUL: Well… around the time we started talking about buying an island—

* * *

22 July 1967  
Athens, Greece 

Disembarking from a plane—any plane—was a hassle Paul could have easily done without. Even with the prospect of a relaxing island vacation dancing daringly close in front of his eyes could not dull the edge of the screams of Athenian fans, or hush the loud pops and blinding strobes of photographic flashbulbs that greeted them upon touching down in the Greek city.

Jane stuck close to Paul’s side as he marched across the tarmac and smiled and nodded at the assembled crowd, one arm clasped around her waist, the other hand clutching Julian’s as the young boy struggled to keep up. John and Cynthia carried their own bags, walking distantly from each other as the group, rounded out by Mal, Alistair, and Patti’s sister Paula, made their way to the cars waiting for them on the ground. 

Paul and Jane rode alone in the last car to leave the airport, at Jane’s urging. As they buckled their seatbelts and the car pulled away, Paul heaved a sigh. “Did you have something you needed to tell me?”

Jane looked at him from under the heavy fringe of hair covering her forehead. “No, why?”

“Because,” Paul continued, annoyed. “I have a hundred things I could be talking about with John right now, and you begged me to ride alone, just the two of us, so I want to know why, that’s why.”

He wished he hadn’t said the words, as Jane’s face fell and he realised how badly he’d hurt her. His temper, tempered as it was by the stress of the flight and lack of sleep and the claustrophobia of the crowds, was more often than not the catalyst for the fights he and Jane suffered through these days. If he were honest with himself, he would have admitted that he knew better, but he didn't have the strength to be that honest anymore, for so many reasons.

“I just wanted some time with you, just you and me,” Jane said finally. “You’re so faraway lately…”

Paul put a hand on her knee, an attempt at placation. “I’m sorry. But it’s not like this is a tour, you know. It’s a holiday. We’ll have alone time.”

“Right,” she nodded, her lips set in a firm but cold smile. He knew she wasn’t buying it.

Annoyance turned to mild anger, and Paul turned to face the window, watching the city of Athens pass by. It was then that he realised that the car behind them was following too close for comfort; Paul watched out of the corner of his eye through the tinted back window of the cab as the black Mercedes tailed them through the narrow streets and several stop lights before finally turning onto the same lane as their hotel.

As the car rolled to a stop and Jane reached over to open the door, Paul’s hand shot out to grab her wrist. “Wait, just a minute.”

“Why?”

He didn’t want to worry her, but he found it hard to smile and convey any reassurance; ever since their experience in the Philippines the year before—so much of which had taken place in that foreign airport, so much like the one he'd just passed through—he supposed he couldn't help being on edge. It was just one more in a litany of reasons why he couldn't relax today. Still, for her part, Jane let him keep up the charade of the Valiant Knight Concerned For Her Safety, and for that he was glad. He tapped the glass separating them from their driver. 

“Do you speak English?” Paul asked.

“Yeah, English,” the driver replied, his voice thick and heavily accented.

“The car behind us… do you know who that is?”

“Not with you?” the driver replied.

Paul shook his head and Jane turned around to look through the window at the car, now parked almost against their bumper.

“Fine,” Paul said, thanking the man. “ _Efharistó_.”

At that moment, John came around the car and knocked on the glass, startling Jane. She rolled the window down.

“What’s the hold up?” he asked.

“Who’s in the car behind us?” Paul hissed.

John turned to look and then smiled. “Didn’t you know Adam would be joining us?”

Paul’s stomach leapt into his throat. He’d had no idea; in fact, he’d almost entirely given up hope of ever seeing Julia again in the month since they’d last spoken. Now, the tantalizing prospect that she might have been accompanying them on their holiday—however remote that possibility might be—sent him swooning.

Jane laughed and playfully swatted Paul on the arm. “And here you were, thinking we’d been followed by the Greek militia or something…”

Paul barely registered her comments; he didn’t dare look back at the car as he swung his legs out and stepped on the hot, sun-bleached pavement leading up to their hotel. He knew he was in a hallowed space, that magical place between what might be and what actually was. The moment he glanced back and either saw Julia or didn’t, the spell would be broken, and he’d have to face the reality of whichever situation presented itself. For now, Julia was Schrodinger's photographer's assistant, and Paul wanted to float in that dreamstate for as long as he could...

But then he heard her voice, and everything came back into crystal clarity for him. He turned his head, saw her laugh and put her hand on Adam’s arm. She carried a linen shoulder bag, slung sideways across her body, and held a large camera case in one hand, the other braced against the door. Beneath the wide brim of her floppy straw hat, he saw her lift her eyes—barely—to meet his, as a small smile broke out over her face. Paul melted into a puddle under the hot Greek sun.

He forced one foot in front of the other as Jane sidled up to him, threading her arm through his. “Oh, and Julia’s here too? I didn’t know—”

Paul pulled his heart out of his stomach and his stomach out of his throat, pushing it aside to get the words out. “Neither did I.”

“In fact,” Jane continued, pressing herself closer to Paul’s side. “I had no idea your photographer knew Julia.”

“Didn’t I tell you that?” he asked. “You knew she was working for us.” He remembered the telecast, Jane putting flowers in Julia’s hair. _She knew…_

“No,” Jane replied. “No, Paul, you didn’t tell me anything.” She was standing so close to him he felt he she might actually succeed in crawling into his skin. Paul bristled and rolled his shoulder to get her to stand off a bit.

“Jesus,” he hissed. “It’s a hundred fifty degrees out and you’re the only person in this entire city who’s lookin’ to cuddle.”

Stung, Jane hung back a bit, slowing her pace and walking a half dozen steps behind him. He imagined her sulking, chewing on her lower lip, eyes downcast, big and heavy and luminously liquid and set deep in her pale face. It was a romanticized, unfair, and ultimately baseless assumption; in all the years he’d known Jane, there was not a single moment where she had ever exhibited behaviours like that. But in his mind, he wanted her to be upset at his dismissal, however erroneous the imagined moment might be, and he couldn’t bring himself to apologize because he knew, the moment he turned to face her, he’d find her smiling, gloatingly, already over it. 

Instead, he hoisted his carry-on bag against his body and followed John and Cynthia into the hotel, choosing to chase a giggling Julian into the lobby instead of dealing with either of the two women he left standing in the car port.

* * *

Later That Evening

_Storm delay_ , Alistair had told them a few hours earlier. Paul had figured on a few hours, maybe the next morning; but as the evening wore on it became increasingly clear that their hired yacht wouldn't be coming for a long while. They were in the blissful position of having absolutely nothing to do, stranded in their hotel in Athens until further notice. 

The news hadn’t sat well with Paul initially; the thought of being cooped up, with Jane in his bed and Julia down the hall, was enough to make him lose whatever tenuous grip he still maintained on his senses. But there was a pool, and a beach not far away by car, and the grounds of the hotel itself were beautifully landscaped in a way that made it feel like a private garden even though it was far from it. And anyway, there was talk of moving their whole operation to Magic Alex's villa the next day anyway, now that they knew they'd have to stick around for a while. So Paul found the ability to make peace with it. He found repose in a wicker lounge chair beneath a palm tree, sheltered from the sun by a vine-covered pergola and from prying eyes by thick foliage and gaudy, fake Greek ruins. 

Jane wanted to go swimming in the ocean after dinner, the storm that had put their yacht out of commission having missed their patch of paradise entirely, but Paul was far from in the mood. Cynthia and Julian took his place, and he could hear them laughing and playing as they ventured out to the beach from the stone-paved garden path that led down from the hotel property to the seaside beyond. While the sun flamed on the horizon in front of him, and the band in the hotel bar ran through what appeared to be the entire Nana Mouskouri catalogue, Paul dozed in half-dreams, Grecian warmth in his skin and bouzoukis strumming along his auditory nerve...

“'Ey now, is that Sleepin' Beauty?”

Paul cracked one eye open. “Depends on who’s askin’.”

John kicked the underside of Paul’s left calf, propped up on a matching wicker ottoman, and the bassist swore under his breath as he vacated the space for John to park.

“Cyn told me you wouldn’t go to the beach,” he said, putting on a voice. “You ‘n the missus ‘avin’ it out?”

Paul harrumphed by way of response, and John nodded.

“I thought things in La Casa de McCharmley were right peachy,” John leaned back against the base of a cheaply-made plaster cast Venus de Milo and nearly knocked it backward into a trio of potted ferns. Paul stifled a chuckle as John righted himself again, resting his arms on his knees. “Laugh it up Paulie, I’m the one who’s gonna get laid tonight…”

“Oh I don’t think it’s _that_ bad,” Paul shrugged.

“Well t’ ‘ear it from Cyn…”

The thought of Jane’s upset brought a slight, egotistical smile to Paul’s lips. He leaned against the chair, bringing one leg up to rest his ankle on the opposite knee as he crossed his arms over his chest, lifting his left hand to chew at his thumbnail. He was merciless, grinding a sliver of loose nail between his teeth until it broke free and then spitting it out onto the flagstone, already cooling in the dusky twilight. 

“Careful there,” John warned. “Some unscrupulous maid’ll pick that up and sell it on the black market after we check out.”

Paul laughed. “Fancy that.”

“What?”

“Did you ever think you’d ‘ave to worry about someone wanting to buy discarded bits of your body, John?”

“Christ, you ‘ave a way with words.”

Paul chuckled, returning to his thumbnail. He talked around his hand. “You saw Julia, I take it.”

John let out a low whistle and scrubbed a hand over his face. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I fuckin’ saw her.”

“You didn’t know she’d be here?”

“No,” John replied. “Did you?”

“No.”

“Then don’t act so surprised that I didn’t, either.”

Paul furrowed his brow. “Do you think she and that Adam bloke…?”

John shrugged. “I don’t care.”

Paul could see that he did; it was plain as day, written all over John’s face. “She looks good.”

"That's all we ever fuckin' talk about when it comes to 'er, isn't it?" came John's reply. "How good she looks. How pretty she is."

For a moment, Paul was stymied into silence. "Well what else are we supposed to talk about?" he asked finally.

John shrugged, staring off into the distance somewhere. “Yeah,” came John’s reply. “Yeah, she always does though, doesn’t she?”

"Does what?"

"Look good."

Paul nodded slowly, leaning back again into his chair.  _That she does_ , he thought to himself.

As if conjured by the nymphs living in the discarded breaths that lingered between them in that moment, they heard the unmistakable sound of Julia’s voice; a laugh and a sing-song goodbye, followed by the soft _trip-trop_ of her leather sandals approaching from the other side of the trees that formed a barrier between the hotel grounds and the public beach below. They sat perfectly still, scared even to breathe, until she rounded the corner came into view between two tall cypress trees. 

She half-turned when she saw them and clasped a hand to her chest, gasping in fright as she took a stumble backwards. “Fuck me!” she cried. 

“Fancy meetin’ you here?” John drawled.

Julia waved her arm in a dramatic arc away from her body—Paul noticed for the first time that she held a half-finished bottle of wine and a long-stemmed glass death-gripped in her hand. “You mean 'ere in this garden or 'ere in Greece?” she shot back.

“Both,” Paul said.

John reached over and pulled out a second footstool from beside Paul’s chair, motioning for Julia to sit, but Julia took another step back. “Oh no, no way. That sunset? This wine? With the music and the palm trees and the fuckin' Aegean breeze?" She shook her head. "No, that’s ‘ow we get into trouble, the three of us…”

Paul scoffed. “Jesus, Julia,” he said. “In a public garden? In fucking Athens? With a hundred balconies overlooking us?” He gestured widely at the hotel behind him. “You must think we’re absolute madmen.”

She wouldn’t give an inch; she narrowed her eyes. “The thought had crossed my mind.”

Paul grinned, looking her up and down. “You ‘aven’t changed a bit.”

Julia seemed caught off-guard; lost for words, she cupped a hand up to her cheek and smoothed her hair, an unconscious _and_ self-conscious act. In the growing dusk, she seemed ethereal, lit from within, her gauzy white dress like a paper lantern meant to diffuse the glow and cast it out from the core of her. Her hair, still damp—from a shower? the salt spray of the Aegean?—hung in waves and loose ringlets past her shoulders. She ran a hand down one long section of hair and then let her fingers drop to fiddle with the braided leather belt cinching her at the hips. Next to the forgery that John still leaned against, Julia looked more like a Greek goddess carved in alabaster than the woman Paul quickly realised he was still very much in love with.

 _Inconvenient,_ _that_ , Paul thought.

“I-I should go,” she stammered.

“Nah,” Paul said, moving to stand. “We’ll go.”

“No,” she replied. “It’s probably best if I went back anyway. I have phone calls to make.”

"No, really, it's fine," Paul countered, and Julia took a breath, readying herself to parley again, but John took control of the conversation.

“You’re always running off,” he confronted her. “Running away from the party, running away from the telecast, running away from this garden…”

She turned and looked out at the sunset for a moment, carefully considering her reply. “I don’t know what else to do,” came her quiet reply.

“I don’t fuckin’ know either,” John said. “How about you stay and talk with us for a minute and see where that gets us?”

She laughed; it was the first time Paul was aware of her level of inebriation, hearing the giggly way she lose control of her mirth in the few seconds that it dropped off her tongue. “I know exactly where it’ll get us! Six months from now, another blowout fight between two of the biggest, horniest egos in Britain. Except this time it might make the papers, and you know how happy that’ll make Mr. Epstein. You’ll get yer asses handed to ya and I’ll lose the best payin’ gig Adam and I ‘ave gotten yet, all because you two can’t seem to get it through yer thick bleedin’ skulls that _this_ —” she motioned between them, “—this is not going to work. It _never_ has. It _never_ will.”

Paul was stunned into silence, and John seemed lost for words as well. They glanced at one another and back at Julia. Paul, while unconvinced for his part, saw the sense in her argument. His arms itched to hold her, but he planted himself in his chair.

“I wish I would’ve known this was the assignment,” she muttered under her breath. “I never would’ve let Adam accept. I never would’ve set foot in England…”

“It’s not so fuckin’ bad,” John said finally, drawing Paul’s attention as well as Julia’s. “Look, if you don’t want us to talk to you, we won’t talk to you. We won’t go near you. We won’t even fuckin’ look at you. But we signed a contract; this is a business arrangement.” He lowered his voice, not quiet enough to be unheard but loud enough to travel. “You should be familiar with those, eh Julia?”

Julia bristled and Paul felt like wringing John’s neck for even thinking about making that connection. But Julia eventually nodded. “I guess I might deserve that.”

“So whatever it is you want from us—”

“Well I don’t want _that_ ,” she said. “I don’t want spite and ugliness and meanness.”

“So what _do_ you want?” Paul interrupted, and both sets of eyes stared back at him. 

Julia thought about the question for a long time before answering. “I’d like to be friends. Honest, I really would.”

John opened his hands, palms up. “What’s so hard about that?” he asked.

“How about the fact that it’s never worked before?” she countered, launching into a pilfered Joyce quote: “ _Love between a man and a woman—_ ”

“We were kids,” Paul joined in.

“Yeah,” she said. “Kids who would’ve torn me limb from limb if it meant you got what you wanted from me.”

“That’s not true,” Paul shook his head. “And it’s spectacularly unfair. You didn’t make it any easier with all your behind-the-scenes this-and-that and stringing us along the way you did.”

Julia sighed deeply and folded her hands in front of her. “I didn’t string you along. You forget that I was a kid too. We all made mistakes. I don’t want to make them again, and I reckon you don’t either,” she took a shuddering breath and seemed to pull painfully at her sternum. “Don’t suppose you lot ever really read _Dubliners_ , did you?”

Paul shrugged and looked at John. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“The stories,” she replied with a sigh, her voice falling softly. “You two are like the narrator in ‘Araby.’ The kid who wants to go to the bazaar to buy a trinket for his friend’s sister. You think it’s all wonderful and beautiful and when you get there, it’s shit.”

“I’m not following you,” John said, squinting his eyes up at her. “So we’re boys at a Persian market?”

She sighed. “Metaphorically, sure.”

“So you’re the sister?” John nudged his glasses up on his nose. “Or are you the bazaar. No, wait, you’re the trinket.”

Paul struggled to keep up, even in the face of John’s sarcastic eyerolls.

But Julia would not be put off. “Look,” she sighed again, seemingly for emphasis. “Everything is different now. _Everything_. Things you don't even know about..."

"So tell us," John challenged.

She continued, unabated. "I’m here to do a job. So let me do it. Don’t ask me ‘round for tea or drinks. Don’t sing songs and tell jokes and pretend that this is anything it isn’t. And for heaven’s sake, don’t tell me things you can’t back up with actions,” she said, letting her eyes linger on their faces for a long moment; her words were plain and their meaning and referents obvious. “Please. My only conditions.”

It felt strange to be the ones on the receiving end of a dictate at this juncture in their lives but neither one seemed at all ready to deny Julia such simple requests. Paul agreed; John nodded his head. Julia lifted the wine bottle and took a generous gulp; wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she passed it to Paul.

"A toast then?" she asked.

"Aye," he nodded, taking the glass and holding her gaze as he sipped from it before handing it to John.

It all seemed too solemn, full of ceremony; entirely fitting, Paul thought, considering the long history they’d had of formalizing important moments in their friendships in such a way. 

He suddenly started to chuckle, and both John and Julia turned to look at him.

“And yer crackin’ up because…?” John asked.

He shook his head. “I’m sorry. This is just—” Paul took a deep breath and stifled another round of laughs. “All that’s missing from this is the pillar candles and we could be right back at Aunt Mimi’s, takin’ oaths and swearin’ allegiance to the mystery of the night.”

Julia’s soft giggle was like music to his ears. She took the bottle back from John and poured what was left into her wine glass. “The Dead Mother’s Society was one of a kind.”

“Was?” John asked. “I think I saw a tiki torch somewhere that could stand in.”

“And I’m sure we could procure a few scarves to double as turbans,” Paul added.

“The most exotic Society meeting in its seven-year history,” Julia smiled.

But before anything could be done, the soft, swift pitter-patter of tiny feet on the stone pathway announced Julian’s presence, while the lilting chatter of Cyn and Jane not far behind signalled the end of the soft promise of whatever the night might have brought them.  _Another bottle of wine, a fragrant breeze, the Grecian moon..._

Julian launched himself into the centre of their triangle, his hair a damp, tangled mess atop his head, a big smile on his face. Paul held out his hand for the toddler to high five, but Julian was stymied by the sight of Julia, a woman he barely remembered. As soon as Cyn rounded the corner behind the statue, the boy ran to his mother and acted shy, hiding between her hips and Jane’s.

“Oh,” Cynthia said, smiling at Julia with genuine warmth. “Hello, Julia.”

“Hello Cyn,” Julia nodded, soft-voiced. “Hello Jane. It's good to see you both.”

“Likewise,” Jane replied.

Their tone was cordial, not unfriendly but far from enthusiastic. Paul looked from Julia to Jane to Cyn to John and felt the weight of the years fall heavy upon the conversation as swiftly as the warmth of the Mediterranean was vacuumed out of the space. 

Julia wasted no time in beating a hasty retreat, the uncomfortable reception evidently not lost on her. When the sound of her footsteps disappeared into the night, Jane cuddled up next to Paul, the afternoon’s indignation passed, and Julian climbed into his father’s lap.

“Who was that?” Julian asked.

John opened his mouth to reply but it was Cynthia who spoke. “She’s an old friend of yer dad’s and Uncle Paul’s.”

“Oh,” was Julian’s simple reply. “What’s her name?”

“Julia,” John and Paul replied in unison. They caught each other’s eyes and lowered them away from each other almost as quickly.

Julian smiled up at Paul. “Julia is like Julian but without an ‘N’, right?”

Paul smiled and nodded, reaching out to ruffle the boy’s damp hair. “Yer gettin’ to be so smart there, Jules. Pretty soon you’ll be smarter’n all of us put together.”

Julian seemed quite pleased with himself and puffed out his chest. “I am four now, you know.”

Cynthia stepped forward and rested a hand on Julian’s shoulder. “All right, la’, time fer beddy-bye. Say goodnight.”

The requisite rounds being made, Julian took off for the hotel, leaving Cynthia and Jane in his dust. Before they left, they turned to John and Paul, now shrouded in shadow, dusted only by the softest reflected lights from the hotel and the newly-risen moon.

“You boys behavin’ yerselves?” Cynthia asked.

“Yes mum,” Paul quipped.

Jane planted a soft kiss on Paul’s cheek. “I hope so,” she said, softly, against his ear.

Before he knew it, they were both gone, and John and he were sitting alone again like they had been before Julia arrived to change the course of their night.

“Well shit,” John said after a while, standing up and stretching his arms above his head. 

“What?”

John looked back at him. “I guess I won’t be gettin’ laid after all.”

Paul laughed, but something about the terse exchange moments before had unnerved him. That John wasn’t taking it so seriously was of little comfort to him. 

* * *

PAUL: The thing I can see now about Julia is that she had this ability to be so strong up front, but inside she was so fragile. ( _Pause_ ) No, not fragile—you could never call Julia fragile. I suppose she was a lot like John, you know. They both had these masks they were able to put on and take off. Julia could act so tough, but beneath all that she was this scared kid. She'd been through a lot, and maybe those things were always with her, always part of her. But now— _still_ _—_ with the alcohol…it was like dancing on the edge of a chef’s knife blade. ( _Pause_ ) One wrong move. That’s all it took to send her into a tailspin...


	50. Day Trippers

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: "[Wanderlust](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD-8urlz7Gg)"

* * *

 JOHN: We’d been there with Alex Mardas—Magic Alex, he was known as. It had been his idea to go, his being Greek and all. ( _Pause_ ) The thing about Alex was that he was an opportunist—everyone is, really, when it comes down to it—but he was more than willing to sell anyone out if it got him what he wanted. So… you know, for example, when the yacht we’d hired was waylaid off Crete, we went to stay with Alex, and he showed us around, took us sightseeing. But at the same time, he’d made some deal with the Greek authorities so that they’d let us in the country with all our drugs, and that deal involved giving the press access for photographs that the country could use to promote tourism. He just wanted the drugs, Alex did. So everywhere we went, mobbed by journalists.

WILSON: Not very relaxing.

JOHN: Right. We didn’t know about this until a couple of days in and by then there was really nothing we could do except take it on the chin. But it meant everyone in our entourage was subjected to the same thing. So the girls, our wives, our inner circle, they were okay, they were used to it. But not everyone was so keen to be hounded by the press…

* * *

23 July 1967  
Delphi, Greece 

“It’s a play about _passion_ ,” Alex said, curling his lips in a wide smile and exaggerating his point by making a fist with his right hand. This he pounded into the palm of his left as he cast his eyes first to Cynthia and then to Jane, sitting on either side of him in the car. “About _emotion_ and _heat_ and _revenge_ —”

“Actually, it’s a play about the evolution of the legal system in Greece,” Paul interjected as their limousine made its way up the road towards the theatre in Delphi where they were to watch a performance of Aeschylus’s _Agamemnon_ , the subject of their sudden debate.

Alex wavered. “Well, but—”

John couldn’t help but beam at Paul. “I wouldn’t argue with our Paul,” he joked. “Would’ve been an English Lit professor if we hadn’t wooed ‘im away with the promise of fame and fortune, isn’t that right, Paulie?”

“Yeah, but also I’m _right_ ,” Paul added with a glance at John. “This, they _definitely_ covered in A-level English.”

John, for his part, had no doubt about it. “It’s all Greek to me,” he joked, cracking a face that made Paul laugh through his obvious annoyance. 

As had been the case all day, the Beatles’ entourage was split between hired cars and large taxis. John and Paul, Cynthia and Jane, and Alex and Neil had crammed into the Mercedes limo; a second Mercedes followed behind, with George and Ringo, Patti and Mal, while Julia and Adam held the rear in a taxi. They'd been last-minute additions to the evening's events, their attendance arranged no doubt by Paul during his forced sojourn in a small town that afternoon while waiting for a car repairman after his own sightseeing was cut short by an overheated engine.

 _Leave that man idle anywhere for a second and he’ll find a way to engineer his own benefits_ , John thought. He'd hated the fact that Julia and Adam would be coming along to see the play. 

Not that he could blame Paul for arranging it. Seeing Julia the night before, sun-dappled and sea-dampened in the hotel gardens, had reminded him of all the promises he’d made and had no intentions of keeping so long as she was nearby; and she _was_ nearby, now that they were all of them being put up in Alex’s sprawling family compound in Athens. Until their yacht arrived, of course, at which point they’d be cooped up under a heavy moon on the open Aegean…

This was why he couldn't stand that she was two cars behind, sitting alone with Adam on the hours-long drive to Delphi and the ancient theatre, carved out of the mountain face. He imagined them holding hands... he imagined them resting their eyes, leaned against each other's shoulders... 

"Yer squeezin' too hard, John," Cynthia whispered, and John looked down at his fingers, entwined with his wife's, and let go.

He felt his ears pop. “I don’t know the first thing about Greek plays except that they’re all fuckin' depressing and tragic,” he said, nodding up the hill—or, at least, in the general direction of ‘up’—“This one, eh? What’s it _really_ about?”  

He knew more than well enough what the play was about; he was just suddenly uncomfortable with the silence, with the tension, with the pressure behind his eardrum.

It was Jane who cleared her throat. “A man betrays his wife and gets his comeuppance,” she said, so matter-of-factly that no one said a word or dared opine on her statement. 

John’s eyes twinkled a bit as his gaze settled on fiery redhead. “Seems a bit simplistic.”

“He killed their daughter so the winds would be more favourable bringing him back from the Trojan war, so his wife plots his murder,” Jane continued. “She stabs him in the bath.”

John made a face. “Oh that's grim.”

“Maybe he had it comin’?” Cyn said quietly.

John cleared his throat, as if getting ready to say something, but just looked out the window at the view down the mountain as they climbed instead.

“‘Course this is only the first part of the trilogy,” Paul took up the explanation. “The kids murder their mother for killing their father in the second part, and then in part three the Furies come after the kids and _that’s_ when Athena steps in to create an impartial judicial system to replace the system of retributive justice that allowed all this madness to ‘appen.”

Neil let out a low whistle. “You know I’ve always liked yer bass playin’, Paul, but maybe you did miss your calling. Gonna start calling you Professor from now on...”

“Nah, it’ll swell his head,” John said, still staring out the window. The mood in the car had shifted imperceptibly. John was suddenly very grateful for the slowing down of the vehicle as they approached the theatre.

What he _wasn’t_ prepared for was the sight of throngs of people crowding the sides of the road and the parking lot where the vehicles were pulling in to let their passengers out. As they wheeled slowly through the masses, both Paul and John pressed their faces to the windows.

“How did everyone—?”

“Christ,” John muttered. He rapped his knuckles on the glass partition; the driver rolled it down. “Keep drivin’.”

“We’ll miss the show,” Jane said.

“Well we can’t get out here, can we?” he shot back.

Paul put a hand on John’s arm and turned to the driver. “Is there another way up to the theatre?”

The driver thought for a moment before replying, in accented English: “Yes, but it’s not easy.”

Paul turned to John, who turned to Neil. The three of them seemed to shrug without saying a single word. “Pull over when you can,” Paul said finally through the rolled-down window, and the driver nodded. The crowds they were passing on the side of the highway began to thin out, and as they rounded another curve in the road they entered the town of Delphi. John saw the cars behind them following close; he breathed a sigh of relief as they pulled one after the other into a side street and parked, three cars in a tight line, hopefully out of sight and hidden away. 

John exited their car first, and ran nearly headlong into George who blustered his way out of the car behind them. “Who tipped ‘em off?” he wanted to know.

John ignored the question. “Our driver says there’s a back way up the mountain.”

“Yeah but it’s all dirt roads. We’ll never make it up there in these cars.”

The rest of the passengers spilled out into the narrow street, exhausted and cramped for the nearly three hour journey into the countryside. Beside him, Neil—without being asked and out of habit—began taking a headcount. John did the same: _Me, Paul… Cynthia, Jane, Neil… Alex… Ringo, George, Patti… Adam…_

_Where’s Julia?_

His eyes scanned the length of the street in both directions. She was nowhere to be found.

“We could walk,” Ringo suggested.

“We’ll miss the show for certain, then,” Paul said.

“This seems like a really bad idea,” George said. “We’ve got no police escort here. It’ll be like Manila all over again.”

At this point Mal and Neil were in deep conversation trying to figure out the logistics; Cynthia slipped her arm through John’s. “Maybe we make the best of this.”

“How’s that?” he asked, slightly distracted and hoping to hide it.

“We could spend the night here in Delphi,” she suggested. “Just the two of us. Have a car come ‘round to pick us up in the morning?”

John shrugged and looked down at their entwined arms. In another lifetime, this wouldn’t have been the worst idea; now, it was all John could do to keep his frustration in check. Their night was ruined, and he knew it wouldn’t be long before hundreds of fans and press photographers made their way down the highway and into the town.

“We’d never have a moment’s peace here,” he said. “The place’ll be stormed within the hour. Less than that.”

A sudden, shrill scream pierced the air and forced the entire entourage to stop what they were doing and look to the source. There, on a side street not a quarter of the way up the block, Julia came tumbling around the corner, pursued by a mob of at least ten men, some with cameras, some with microphones and tape recorders, and a sizeable contingency of shrieking female fans. Cries of “She’s with them!” and “Grab her camera!”, in broken English as well as loud Greek, met their ears just before one of the press snatched Julia’s camera strap in hand, yanking it back, and Julia fell off-balance, landing on the cobbled street as the man tried to take the equipment from her. The mob descended like vultures, and Julia’s screams echoed in the alley as her hair and her clothes bore the brunt of the attack.

It seemed for a long moment as if time stood still. John watched as two men now—leather jacketed, in spite of the heat, with dark glasses obscuring their faces, black hair quiffed and shiny, hollering in Italian—fought over Julia’s camera, with Julia caught in the middle. They had the collar of her tunic in their hands; they had her foot in their hands. A shoe flew off; her shirt sleeve ripped.

In the midst of it all, Julia was utterly bereft, largely motionless except when pushed or pulled by the men towering over her. John could do nothing but stare.

Mal was on the mob in a second, barrelling through the crowd and lifting Julia off the ground where she’d fallen and snatching her camera back from the man who’d taken it all in one seemingly fluid motion.

John’s stomach dropped. “Get back in the car,” he urged Cynthia, who took his advice without question, running down the sloped street; both she and Jane climbed back in as Alex held the door open for them.

“ _Everyone_ back to the cars,” Neil hollered. The entourage made a mad dash for the vehicles nearest to them, not caring about prior seating arrangements. Paul and John ducked in just behind Alex and found themselves in a car with their partners, with Adam, with Alex, and with Julia, whom Mal had deposited in the car before making his way back to the taxi parked at the rear with Neil to lead the getaway back down the mountain. 

The doors were locked and the driver, without needing to be told, pulled away from the scene as fast as was safely possible. 

The whirr of the car engine filled the cain as Julia, sandwiched between Cynthia and Adam, sat stunned, silent, her clothes in tatters. Everyone's eyes were on her. She was bleeding from a scratch on her chest, from when the camera had been yanked from her neck. But while everyone watched her, Julia's eyes were vacant as she studied her camera, singularly focused on the machine in her lap. John watched as her hands cradled the body, fingertips searching for scratches and dents; she shook the camera and listened for unknown rattling, but found none. It seemed as though the camera itself emerged unscathed.

No one could say the same for Julia.

Her face was flushed. The bloody scrape on her chest bled angry red, droplets of blood standing up against her pale and sunburnt decolletage. He could see from the heaving rise and fall of her chest, the splotched and ruddy flush in her skin, the wide pupils and trembling hands that she, unlike the camera, was very much _not_ okay.

“Julia?”

It was Adam’s voice that said her name, and Julia responded to him as she might have once done to John, or Paul; tears sprang to her eyes as she allowed her hands to fit within Adam’s and began to mutter in French. John fought to contain his rage at what had just happened, and to quell the rising jealousy that Adam’s mere presence in the same vehicle provoked. _If he wasn’t here, I’d be the one she turned to…_

"I was just climbing up to get a photo."

"I know."

"Just one photo... I didn't think... just thought the photo would be..."

“You’re okay,” Adam soothed, gripping her hands in his. “You’re alright.”

“ _C'était la même chose_ … I thought I was…”

“I know, but you’re not. That’s not what this was. It wasn't the same. You’re here in Greece and you’re safe and we’re heading back to Athens now—” he looked up at Paul and John across from him, as if confirming the itinerary. John nodded. Beside him, Paul did the same.

Julia moaned a little, softly, into the back of her hand. “I need a drink," she whispered.

“You don’t need a drink,” Adam said. “A drink has never solved any of this…”

Julia’s voice was so quiet that the hum of the engine nearly drowned it out; John strained to listen, and resorted to reading her lips to catch what his ears missed. 

“Back to Athens,” Julia whispered, her eyes closed. “Back to Athens, not in Speke.”

“Not in Speke.”

" _Ce n'était pas_..."

"That's right," Adam reassured her. "It's not what you think... just breathe..."

Julia sighed and brought a hand to her chest; it was the first time she was aware of the bloody scratch. As she looked down, bewildered at the sight, Cynthia reached into her bag and retrieved a tissue. 

“Here, Jules,” she said, pressing the tissue to the scratch. 

“Ta,” Julia whispered.

John was very nearly overcome. They drove down the mountain, this time bringing up the rear of the convoy, and passed the lingering crowd on the edge of the road near the turn off for the theatre. He was pissed that they’d driven all this way for nothing; but he was shaking because he’d very nearly seen someone he cared about torn to pieces by an out-of-control mob…

_He longed to defend her against something and then to be alone with her… she seemed to him so frail…_

A snippet of a story, read so long ago it might as well have been another lifetime.

John looked to Paul, and saw the same emotions in his face as were in his own. No words needed to be spoken; a whole silent conversation passed between them.

_She’s gonna be fine?_

_Yeah she’ll be fine._

_Glad Mal got to her in time._

_Fuckin’ glad._

_Adam knows how to calm her down fairly well._

_He knows her better than we ever did._

_That’s a lie._

_Not it’s not, mate. Have a look._

_Fuck, you’re right._

_Told you._

_Still though…_

_Yeah, still._

“I think I can explain everything,” Alex said suddenly.

John stared at the man, sitting on the only sideways-facing seat in the vehicle, between the benches along the driver’s side of the car. 

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you see… in order that you should enjoy this holiday without fear of persecution…”

Alex explained his deal with the military junta—press and photojournalist access for a blind eye to the drugs—and tried to paint himself in the best light in the process, all the while offering his sincerest apologies to Julia for the harm that befell her.

At the end of it all, Cynthia and Jane were silent, their faces ashen and, beside John, Paul seemed ready to explode.

But it was Julia who actually did.

“You don’t do that!” she cried.

"What?" Alex asked, slightly bemused.

Julia was having none of it. “If you’re ‘anging around these lads, you don’t compromise their safety an’ security so you can ‘ave the right kind of acid, mate!” Her voice shook as she continued. “That’s just about the dumbest fuckin’ thing I’ve ever ‘eard, and I grew up with this lot, so I’ve ‘eard a lot of dumb shite…haven't you ever heard of discretion? You don't get to make choices like this. Not without talkin' to them. Fuckin' hell...”

Adam put his hand on Julia’s knee and she took a breath, leaning back into the seat and pressing Cynthia’s tissue to her chest a little tighter.

“I said I’m sorry,” Alex protested into the silence.

“You blood well should be,” were Julia’s final words on the subject. She leaned back against the seat and closed her eyes, shrugging off Adam’s hand with a curt _“I’m fine”_ before, eventually, resting her head against his shoulder and falling asleep. 

No one breathed a word for the rest of the trip back.

* * *

 

When they arrived back in Athens, everyone partnered off to their separate sleeping quarters; John watched from the courtyard as Adam and Julia’s figures receded into the distance.

“I’ve never seen her that upset before,” Paul whispered to John.

“Can you blame her?” John said.

“For a minute I thought it was Eppy talking.”

“It was uncanny.”

"I mean, she really took 'im to task. I thought it was because she'd been hurt, she was scared but—"

"Maybe it was..."

Before the conversation could take root, however, Jane yawned. Cynthia stood up as straight as the six-hour round trip fatigue in her spine would allow and cleared her throat. 

“Well, good night you two,” she said, and Jane smiled at Cyn as she cajoled Paul’s feet to follow hers lead down the pathway and into the house towards their room. 

“What was that?” John asked when they were out of earshot.

“What was what?”

“You two have a little secret pact or something? A code for when you want to stop talking?”

“No one’s got a _code_ , John,” Cynthia _tsked_. “If you want to stay up and jaw all night with Paul, well, be my guest. But Jane was tired, and if sending her to bed was wrong of me, well—”

John stared off down the hallway but Paul was long gone. He itched all over, prickled still from the confrontation on the side of the mountain, and then by the one in the car, Julia covered in scratches, the collar of her shirt torn by the crazies, her hands shaking as she leaned into Alex for putting _them_ in danger… 

 _Yeah, I would’ve fuckin’ liked to stay up with Paul,_ he wanted to tell his wife, but he knew that was only a half-truth: he wanted Julia to be there too...

Cynthia was a smart woman; she guessed at it immediately. “You know she’s got someone now, eh?” she asked. “That Julia’s not alone in this world anymore?”

“What of it?”

A pause. Cynthia rested a hand on her hip. “She’s not gonna be needin’ you two fighting over who gets to rescue her, is what.”

John screwed up his face and huffed. “Right, and what would you know of any of that?”

“Oh John…” came his wife’s exhausted reply. She needn’t say anymore; instead, she just bowed out of the conversation completely tracing a line in Jane and Paul’s wake down the path towards the house. 

John didn’t follow. Instead, he waited until he was alone, then kicked a pebble beneath his contemptuous foot. It landed in a patch of tall flowers. Like Cynthia, like Paul, like Julia, he watched it roll away until he couldn’t see it any longer. Then he shoved his hands into his pockets and wound his way around the courtyard until he found an arbor, a white wooden bench beneath it; he resigned himself to the cushions, sitting down and crossing his legs beneath him. 

The disaster of a night was nearly at an end. He just wanted to go to sleep. But pride would keep him from laying his head next to his wife’s. So, in self-righteous anger, he curled up against the cushion and lay his head here instead, the heat of day still lingering around him, and closed his eyes.


	51. Words Are Futile Devices

* * *

Chapter Soundtrack: "[Futile Devices (Doveman Remix)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZBCogVtano)" / "[Trust](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH3caZvVE2A)"

* * *

 Later that morning...

John awoke to find himself sweat-drenched and tensed, spoiling for a fight he couldn’t see or understand. He sat up halfway, groggy, sleep-slowed, as his near-sighted eyes took in what he could only surmise had to be Julia’s worried face.

“You okay?”

Her voice sounded strange, husky and deep, as though she wasn’t quite herself. He brought his hand up to find his glasses were gone. Julia pressed them into his other hand, still in his lap.

“They must have fallen."

He slipped them onto his nose and muttered his thanks, his own voice sounding strange to him, coming out thin, trapped in the back of his throat. He looked at her then, clearly; she’d changed her clothes, out of the torn and ruined tunic and into some kind of linen frock. Where the strings had come undone across her chest, he could see a few bandages, a reminder of their strange ordeal in Delphi. Her hair was pinned back from the sides of her head, curling in the humidity. In the pale moonlight, her skin glistened. It was obvious that she’d been crying.

He swallowed. “What happened?”

Julia took up a seat across from him, in a wrought iron chair sat in front of a small, round tiled table. “Night terrors, by the sounds of things.”

“No,” he shook his head, sitting up straighter. “You’re crying. What happened?”

She shook her head. “Nothing _happened_ ,” she said, and it was the way she said it that told him what he needed to know. Because nothing ever _needed_ to happen.

John scrubbed a hand over his face. “Did I wake you?”

“Wasn’t asleep,” she said. “I was out for a walk, clearing my head. I had no idea you were here…” 

“Clearing your head?”

“It was a rough day, John.”

He nodded. “Right,” he said.

“You sure you’re alright?”

He shrugged. “I suppose so.” All the fuss seemed misplaced. He couldn’t remember the dream he’d been having, though he supposed the damp hair along the nape of his neck was proof positive that he’d had it. He shivered in spite of the sweltering heat. “Are _you_ okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” 

“Well you’re not sleeping. You’re out walking alone. You’re crying.”

She leveled an amused gaze at him. “I haven’t slept well in years, John. You know that.”

He didn’t think he did. “So it’s not because of what happened earlier?”

Julia’s face fell and she shook her head, but John could tell that he’d said something upsetting. There was no time to take it back or say something more. Sounds from the other side of the courtyard—a door hinge creaking, footsteps on the gravel pathway—took him by surprise. He could tell it was Paul.

The younger man appeared on the edge of their little triangle, hastily dressed and rubbing his eyes, a glass of water in his hand. “Here,” he handed the glass to Julia, who gave it to John, placing it against his palm with her own shaking hands.

He held the glass for a long moment, staring at it, feeling the weight of it in his hand while he got wise to what had just transpired. His wild imagination, still hooked in to the edge of sleep and whatever nightmare he’d found there, dreamed up a thousand scenarios to explain whatever private moment had led to them both finding him here, and to—obviously—Julia sending Paul inside for water. And then he felt a shivering slip of a memory, loosened by the free association exercise he’d been playing at, that told him _Ah, yes, you were having a nightmare… it was Paul and Julia together in the ocean, making love in the ocean, and you were stuck on the shore and there was a huge wave coming at them and you couldn’t get their attention, so you jumped and shouted and yelled…_

“Drink up, John,” Julia urged.

Like a child, he obeyed. “Did I wake you, too?”

Paul nodded. “Fairly certain you woke the whole house,” he said, adding with a smirk: “You’ve always had quite the set of lungs on you, haven’t you?”

John gulped down the rest of the water; he needed something to do with his hands, with his mouth, somewhere to rest his eyes. His fingers trembled. “Fuck, I need this to be scotch,” he said into the empty glass as he pulled it away from his mouth.

“Sorry, fresh out,” Paul said as he sat down in his own patio chair with a heave, his tired shoulders slumping forward. “Unless you want to get into the vino…”  
_Not half a bad idea_ , he thought, but didn’t say anything. 

“What time is it?”

“No idea,” Julia replied. “Maybe three in the morning.”

John sighed, annoyed now. “Well I’m fine, so you two can go back to… _whatever_ it was—”

“Oh John,” she said. John looked up at her, her admonishment hanging in the air. Paul snorted; it only incensed John more.

“Oh this is funny is it?”

Paul held his hands up in defense. “The fact that you’re in the doghouse and kippin’ under an arbour and accusing the two of us of sneakin’ around, yeah, it’s a bit funny.” 

John shook his head. “Not in the doghouse,” he said. “Just…”

 _Just_. Paul nodded, and John knew that he knew without having to say another word. 

“So you two weren’t…?”

“John!” she hissed. “What was it, yesterday? Two days ago? We talked about this. Friends.”

“But surely you and Adam—he looks like he could give it good,” John smirked, now just eager to make her laugh. It didn’t work. She dug in her heels.

“Jealousy’s never been a good look on you, you know, John. If it’s not _‘im_ —” she jerked her head towards Paul, “—it’s Adam, and if it weren’t Adam, it’d be George, or Neil, or Mr. Epstein, for heaven’s sake.”

Julia shook her head and John let his eyes soften around his affection for her. She was right; she was almost always right. “I’m just fuckin’ around, Jules.”

She chewed her lip. “If you must know, even though it’s none of yer business, Adam tries his best to help me sleep but the only thing that works is alcohol—” she trailed off for a moment. “Well, and one other thing. _Two_ other things, I suppose, if I’m being truthful.”

Paul leaned his head in his hand. “Four things, maybe, if you count the book.”

Julia smiled. “You’re right. Four things then.”

“So what helps you sleep best?” John asked. “Me, Paul, alcohol, or James Joyce?”

Paul shot daggers at him. _What are you thinking?_ he seemed to ask. _What kind of a question is that?_

_Do you really want the answer?_

But Julia shrugged. “From what I remember, it’s a dead heat,” she said. “I sleep more soundly with Paul. No dreams to wake me up. But I sleep longer with John. It balances out.”

 _How does she do that?_ he wondered, shifting in his seat against the uncomfortable stirrings beneath his navel. _She’s talking about both of us, around us, never to us_. 

“Well if neither of us were there, no wonder you couldn’t sleep,” John said finally. “Not sure if you brought your book but I’m guessin’ that’s sittin’ on a shelf by the ocean a million miles away, am I right?” he narrowed his eyes. “So that begs the question—much have you had to drink tonight?”

“Not enough for that,” Julia breathed.

Paul interjected on John’s behalf. “I’m sure that’s not what he meant.” 

A dream flitted across her face. “With you lot, I can never tell.”

In the silence that expanded to fill the space between them, they heard birds chirping in far off trees, the whirr of car engines on city streets. Another door—the same door, maybe?—opened across the courtyard; John heard George’s distinct Scouse as he and Ringo approached down the same path Paul had taken only moments before.

“Oh so it’s a party!” Ringo grinned.

George pulled up another wrought iron chair. “We’re not interrupting anything, are we?”

“Hardly,” Julia smiled, turning her attention to John. “Our John has had a wee nightmare and we thought we’d sing ‘im back to sleep.”

Ringo chuckled. “I heard that bit.”

“We _all_ heard that bit,” said George.

John shook his head. “Sorry fellas,” he said, meaning it sincerely and entirely incapable of coming up with a witty reply to tack on to the end.

More silence invaded the space between the five of them, now. The sky along the eastern horizon was beginning to lighten, and John scratched his nose. _It’s later than three in the morning if the sun is coming up,_  he thought. It made him sad, the evaporating nighttime. Sunlight afforded no privacy, no place to hide; here in the long twilight shadows, however… 

 _But even then, what secrets are left?_ John wondered. Once upon a time he’d have given anything to have it all out in the open—everything between him and Julia—if only to push things to a conclusion he could live with. Now, with free conversation flowing between and around them, what difference would sunlight make? 

He wanted something private. He wanted something that was _just theirs._..

“So is this what you three _do_?” Ringo asked suddenly.

John and Paul turned to their drummer.

“Not usually,” Julia replied, softly but amused nonetheless.

That made George laugh. “I should say.”

“It’s an unofficial meeting of the Dead Mother’s Society,” Paul quipped.

“Aye,” Julia winked.

“The what?” Ringo asked.

So they told him, and he laughed, and George—who had heard it all before years earlier—rolled his eyes but laughed, too, at the faux pomposity and religiosity of the whole thing. 

When the silliness was over and Julia sank back to her seat after demonstrating the incantation pose, Ringo sighed. “Jules, I had no idea yer mum was gone,” he said, reaching over to put a hand on her arm. “I’m so sorry.”

Julia put her hand on his. “‘S alright, that. I don’t suppose I ever truly had her anyway.”

John watched as she pulled the words from her mouth, not like a struggle but like a reluctance, soft and slow, choosing her words very carefully. She told them all about her mother’s mental illness, the long periods of instability, her going away for months at a time. She told them about her Dad leaving, and about his death in Paris. She made only the most oblique references to her stepdad. John focused on the toe of his shoe the whole time.

And then…

“I suppose at the end she did what she had to do to find her peace,” Julia whispered. “We should all be so lucky to be able to find that.”

“Wait,” Paul interrupted, sitting up and leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. “You mean… yer mum…?”

Julia nodded. “Off the end of a pier,” she said, adding a bit quietly: “She never could swim.”

John looked to Paul, who looked to him, and he could tell that they were both thinking the same thing, about that night on the bridge, beneath an October sky… 

“Well,” George said finally.

“It explains a lot,” said Ringo. “About the three of yeh. No wonder, I mean… losin’ yer mums… I just don’t know.”

“Yeah,” Julia took in a deep breath. “Yeah, I s’pose it’s been a rough go. But we always had the Dead Mother’s Society to keep us going. Until we didn’t.” She smiled and looked around the circle they’d formed. “Maybe we’ll get back there again.” And then she sighed. “I wouldn’t change any of it, not even the really bad stuff, because it all led to this, to us, right now. And this is nice, innit?”

George nodded. “Yeah, it is.”

“Real nice,” Ringo added.

“Like the old days,” Paul added.

“We never did this back then,” Julia smiled.

“Yes we did!” John interjected, and both he and Paul said, at the same time: “The mews house!”

George nodded. “I miss the mews.”

“Whatever happened to that place?”

Julia rested her head in her hand, perched on the small table. “Still have it,” she said. “Lots of memories there.”

She looked at John, and John looked at her, and under the quickly dissipating cover of darkness, he thought he saw her smile.

“Julia here was our first fan,” Paul said. “Back in the Quarrymen days.”

“Oh I don’t know about that,” Julia said.

“You were!” Paul countered. 

Julia tilted her head. “No, I mean I wasn’t a fan,” she said. “Thought you lot were a bit shite to be honest.”

Ringo laughed, and then Paul laughed, and Julia winked, and soon they were all giggling, trying to keep quiet and failing miserably. John’s heart ached, positively cleaved, at the sound of her laughter. _It could be like this..._

The sun was most definitely rising, and the courtyard was lightening in shades of grey. The house would be awake soon, along with the whole of Athens. John felt time slipping away, was acutely aware of it even as he sat there and tried, _really tried_ , to hold on to it. 

Julia sighed and lifted her hand to the bandaged scratches on her chest, fingering them lightly before dropping her hand to her lap. “I’m truly sorry that we didn’t get to see the play tonight.” 

“It wasn’t your fault,” Ringo told her.

“Thanks, Rich,” she smiled. “If I’d just stayed in the car, I suppose—”

“No,” Paul said. “The fans, the press—they’d all still have been there.” 

Julia shrugged looked up at John and then Paul. “I meant what I said. All these years. You know better than most how people take advantage.” She shook her head. “I can’t believe Alex. A piece of fuckin’ work…”

“What do you mean?” George asked.

Paul’s eyes widened. “Oh, you didn’t hear…” 

“Hear what?” George countered.

“Jules set him to rights,” Paul continued, telling the story of Alex’s deception, and Julia’s angry diatribe in the limo. John looked over to see her blushing as Paul regaled them all, embellishing a bit here and there as necessary, which only served to make her blush harder.

When the story was done, George was admiring. “Well hell, Jules. Who knew you had it in you?”

As if on cue, John and Paul each raised their hands, and they all laughed.

“She’s blistering,” Paul said. “Always has been.”

“Ridin’ in to rescue us,” John said, realizing that Cyn was right. _No one needs to rescue you,_ he thought as he looked at her.

“Stop it,” she winked before yawning, setting off a round of yawns around the circle. John made the first move to get up. 

“The Sun is knocking at the door,” he said.

George followed his lead, and so did Ringo. Paul was the last to stand, and the three of them broke off into soft conversation, leaving Julia reclined sleepily in her chair at John’s side.

“ _Five_ things,” she muttered. In the silvery refraction of the rising sunlight, still at least an hour away, Julia once again seemed unreal; a mythical vision, not a human being. _Fitting that we’re in Greece. She belongs with the oracles_ , John thought as he stepped a half-step closer to her so as to hear her better.

“Hm?” 

“To help me sleep,” she said. “Add this to the list.”

“Staying up all night to talk to a bunch of tossers?”

She lifted a finger and graced the edge of his finger, resting near hers on the arm of the garden chair. He pressed his pinky into hers, thrilling through their secret contact. 

“You’re not tossers,” she whispered, leaning on her other hand and turning her attention to the three standing apart in quiet conversation. “You go on. I’m going to watch the sunrise for a bit longer before I turn in.”

John turned his attention back to the group, then to Julia again, before rolling his shoulders. “Right,” he said softly. “Night, Julia.”

The other three chorused after him, and Julia sighed her reply. Then they walked out through the garden along the path they’d all come in on.

“I get it now,” George said quietly as they closed the door and shut themselves in the warm cloistered dark of the terracotta-tiled hallway.

“You get what?” Paul asked.

“You want to save her,” he said. “The both of yeh.”

“Yer daft,” John sneered. “She doesn’t need to be saved.”

But George wasn’t done. “Maybe, but you want to be the only reason she’s okay. And I don’t blame you. I wanted it too, once upon a time…”

Paul scoffed. “Wait, _you_ tried to pull ‘er?”

George shook his head. “No. But while you two were so busy trying to make it happen, I was the only one who noticed she was living in her car—”

“She _what_?” John wasn’t sure if he or Paul, or both, had said it. It didn’t much matter in the end, though; it had been said, and that was the point.

“Before she moved into that apartment near Mona’s place,” George replied. “You two ‘ad no idea, did you?”

John tried to remember that far back but came up empty. They were the days of Paul’s courtship, when John had made such deliberate efforts to distance himself and had come up unsuccessfully every time. He looked at Paul, while Paul looked off out the window into the courtyard. He shook his head. “She never told me anything…”

“All these years,” George continued. “You’ve ‘ad yer ‘eads so far up—and after everything that ‘appened with her stepdad…”

“Her stepdad?” Ringo asked.

Paul turned back to Ringo. “That’s a long story…”

“You know? I think she killed him,” John interrupted.

“She killed her stepdad?” Ringo asked.

Paul’s eyes shot to John’s. “She told me it was a bunch of Teds who did ‘im in—”

John shrugged and Paul stopped talking. “Who knows for sure?” 

George shuffled his feet. “Yeah, it’s so clear now,” George said. “But you know all of that is past. She’s got Adam. She’s got California. And if you know what’s best, you’ll let that be the end of it and strive to deserve her friendship and nothing more… she’s a good kid, deep down.”

John could agree with that; Julia was a good person. A mixed up, deeply troubled person, but a good one nonetheless. He wish he knew how to keep her at arm’s length… 

“Fuck,” Ringo muttered. “Well I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep after that, but I’ve got to try. I’m knackered…”

George nodded, his eyes flitting back and forth from John’s face to Paul’s. “You two okay?”

Paul nodded. “It’s good to get this all out in the open, I reckon,” he said, looking to John to agree with him; John nodded out of habit, because it was the polite thing to do. But he had so many questions, and even more misgivings.

George blinked sleepily and said his good nights; he and Ringo parted ways, leaving John and Paul standing at the door. For a long moment, neither of them said anything.

“What a night,” John whispered.

“Did you know about her mum?” Paul asked.

John shook his head. “You didn’t either?”

“No idea.”

“Fuck…” John scuffed his shoe against the tile. “A group of Teds?”

“She said he owed them money,” Paul said. “That they bashed his head in with a pipe.”

“He raped her, her stepdad,” John said. “Repeatedly. His mates too, they all had a go. He kept her locked up, the bastard.”

Paul went white. “I figured… well, I figured it was bad. I didn’t think—” he said softly. “Fuck…”

“Fuck.”

If Paul was feeling half of what John was feeling, they were both screwed. John looked out the window, but couldn’t see Julia sitting at the table any longer. He nervously shifted his weight from one foot to the next.

“We can do better by her,” Paul said.

“I know.”

“We’ve _got_ to—”

“ _Okay_ , Paul.”

“Okay.”

More silence, this time punctuated by a long yawn that stretched Paul’s lithe frame in front of John’s eyes as he leaned into it and let it consume him.

“I’m dead on my feet,” he said.

“Get to bed, son.”

Paul smiled. “Night, John.”

“Night.”

Once again, after a moment, John was all alone. He wasn’t about to go to bed; he wanted to wait for breakfast to suss out how Cynthia was feeling, and wasn’t about to creep into their bedroom at this hour if she was still mad at him. He’d seen a book of crossword puzzles in the kitchen. Maybe he’d pour himself a glass of orange juice and do what Julia was doing, watch the sunrise, but inside instead…

He walked along the dark corridors to find the kitchen. Before he turned on the light, however, he was startled to find Julia already there, rinsing out the glass Paul had brought out for him earlier. He watched her for a long moment, silently and sincerely wondering how in the world he was going to survive being _just friends_.

 _We can do better by her_.

_Right, Paul. We can._

He cleared his throat, just a little, to get her attention. When she heard him she wasn’t surprised or taken aback; rather, she set her hands on the edge of the sink, and her shoulders rolled back square as she turned to face him.

“John…”

Two steps to cross the kitchen and she was in his arms, and he was kissing her, and she was kissing him back, her fingers in his hair, his hands on her backside. He breathed the day off her skin and felt her return life to his. When she pulled away—marking this off as just a kiss and nothing more—she was smiling.

“Friends, John.”

“Fuck _friends_.”

“It’s too complicated.”

“Fuck _complicated_.”

She sighed through a sad little laugh. “You’ll be the death of me, Lennon… the very death of me.”

“And I’ll die without you.”

“You won’t.”

“I need you, Julia.”

She pressed a finger to his lips. “Not here. Not like this,” she sighed. “Oh fer Chrissakes, John. So much has happened… so much I can’t tell you…”

“Why not?”

“Because…” was all she said, and she stood there for what seemed like an eternity before she looked up at him, and he noticed that her face had changed. “Okay, John,” she said.

“Okay?”

“Let’s get in a car and just drive. Somewhere. _Anywhere_.”

“What?”

“Let’s drive away. Together.”

“Now?!”

She hiked her shoulders up to her ears and let them drop. “What better time is there?”

John hesitated. He hesitated and looked into her eyes, searching for something to hold on to, and found himself swimming in Mersey waters that pooled around her pupils and threatened her lashes. _Get in a car and drive? Where? What car? We can’t leave, not like this. Can we? No. It isn’t right._

“Julia—”

“Right,” she smiled, nodding. She took a deep breath, pressed her hands to his chest and pushed him away. He felt like he was being tested; this was a test, and he’d failed. “Go to Cynthia. Go to bed.”

“But—”

“No.”

He stepped back. “So what now?”

“I don’t know. I’m… confused. You’re confused.”

“I’m not,” he said. “I know what I want.”

“No you don’t.” She cocked her head to the side and smiled. “You don’t, John. You’re tired, you're _lonely_ , and—”

“We can’t just up and _leave_ , Julia.”

She ignored nim. “So we should sleep, and _what dreams may come_ …” Julia trailed off, closing the gap between them then and straightening his collar. Then she let her hands trail down his arms, taking his hands in hers before lifting his hands to her lips and pressed a kiss to his knuckles. “This has all been a lovely dream…”

“Julia—”

“But we should try being friends, John.”

“You sound like Paul.”

“Good. At least I know one of you has good sense left.” She let his hands drop and slipped away from the edge of the sink and began to walk away from him.

“Would _he_ have gone with you?” John asked over his shoulder.

Julia stopped. “No, probably not.”

_Do better by her._

_What if we can’t?_

John sighed and turned to face her. “Stay.”

She shook her head. “No. Time for me to try to sleep.” She peeked out the window behind him. “It’s daybreak. I’ll sleep now. Because the sun’ll be up, and sunlight keeps the darkness at bay, isn’t that right?”

 _Obviously_ , he said. “What’s so bad about the darkness?”

She looked at him and cocked her head to the side, as if considering the question for the first time. “Everything,” she admitted. Then she lowered her head with a small smile and disappeared down the hall, leaving John braced against the kitchen sink, his heart in his throat.

* * *

JOHN: If I'd run away with her it would have fucked everything. Absolutely everything. And I couldn't do that. And  _that_ was the problem all along. I can see that now—she was willing to do so much for us, and in all those years, what had we done for her? ( _Pause_ ) George was right. George was _frequently_ very right. And in this case, so was Paul. So I don't know what happened to make things change between the two of them, but something must have. Because before too long—inside that week, when we finally made it on the yacht—well...


	52. Casting Out Into the Glorious Deep

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the long chapter...couldn't find a decent place to break it up into two!

Chapter Soundtrack: "[Sea Mist](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD4_xG35zUs)" / "[Awakening](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIDIDW8D7nA)"  
  
PAUL: The night we stayed up talking in the garden was one of the nicest we’d had as a band in a long time. We were at ease, the four of us. And Julia was there, and she really was someone special in our little circle, and I don’t think until that day we’d realized that. At least I hadn’t. 

MURPHY: Why not?

PAUL: I suppose because I wanted to sleep with her, you know. She was a woman I wanted; she wasn’t just a friend. But after that night—after we talked, after I saw how nice it could be to just be friends… well I was determined that we should be. ( _Pause_ ) Maybe George was right and we did want to, quote-unquote, “save her” but I think more than anything I just wanted to _help her_ . So that night on the yacht, on day _whatever_ of her not sleeping…  

* * *

28 July 1967  
Somewhere in the Aegean… 

_Another Grecian sunset_ , Paul mused as he leaned against the cabin door and caught his balance as the _M.V. Arvi_ pitched a little unexpectedly, sending him into the door frame. They’d dropped anchor for dinner and a sunset swim and had decided to just stay, close enough to the island off the starboard quarter that they could pick up their sightseeing the next day easily enough, but far enough away that the wake of larger cruising vessels caused more than minor disturbances to the even keel they enjoyed in calmer waters. No one, up until now, seemed to mind. 

As the sun dropped into the sea, leaving the sky resplendent in colours that shamed the citrus and jewels that also carried their names, Paul marvelled at the fact that he felt… nothing. Days of tripping and lounging in the hot sun had left his pale, English body heatstroked and numb, suddenly, to the things that only months ago would have elicited endless awe. He scrubbed his eyes and shook his head, contemplated sticking his hands over the edge of the boat and rinsing the day from his face. Anything to get back the feeling… 

He’d passed George and John on the way up—they having spent most of the afternoon and evening fiddling with ukuleles in forward-facing deck chairs, having fun, writing songs, larking about just the two of them. It hadn’t upset Paul; he’d not been in the mood to write or play and could hardly begrudge others for indulging where he couldn’t. But as they’d squeezed alongside one another in the narrow stairway leading between decks, smelling of sea spray and clearly having just climbed aboard after a swim, George had cast his eyes up and back. 

“Julia’s up there,” he said.

That had nearly done it.

In spite of their conversations, the firmness with which the word “friendship” had been repeatedly said, Paul was more than a little bit uncomfortable with both her proximity and propensity to seek out others for alone time. Before Ringo had gone home to be with a very-pregnant Maureen, he’d spent a day learning to fish with Julia; at the last town they’d stopped at, she’d loitered alone with George while he contemplated buying a _bouzouki_ , and then spent a considerable amount of time learning how to play the ukulele instead. He suspected that’s all this was—an extension of that lesson, of the friendship she was so desperate to create with all of them, which had blossomed in a pre-dawn Athenian garden a few days earlier and grew to full bloom in the salt air of the sea on which they’d planted it. 

He wasn’t worried about Ringo, though, or George.

It was John.

John, who had stayed behind that night in the courtyard, when everyone else but him and Julia had gone to bed.

John, whose gaze had barely left her face that entire time.

John, whom Paul had interrupted in the mews house all those weeks ago.

John had been up on deck with Julia too, under constellations birthed and named and sent heavenward from these islands, and that thought had propelled Paul’s feet a little quicker as he’d ascended the final steps to the deck and was sent sprawling into the doorjamb for his troubles. 

Hit with the salty breeze and free from the haze of smoke and stale closeness of the air below decks, his head cleared and he felt a little refreshed, a little less jealous; in all honesty, he had to admit that it just felt good to _feel_ , and he supposed he ought to thank John and Julia for planting that in his mind to begin with. 

Maybe there was something good to be had in this rivalry after all.

 _But no_ , he thought eventually. _We need to do better than that..._

Movement at the starboard bow caught his attention, and as both he and the boat returned to equilibrium again, he gained the deck boards and began making his way into the dimness to where he knew he’d find her. There, in the half-light of the pendulous orb on the horizon, Julia lay sprawled and relaxed, her feet propped up on the bow’s corded railing as she strummed a ukulele in her lap. The night breeze was warm but she was wearing only a bikini top and a pair of high-waisted shorts, and the puddles around her indicated that she, too, had just returned from the ocean. She was staring at the stars which had only just begun to emerge in the canopy above her head. Two cameras sat nearby.

Paul smiled, finally at ease. She hadn’t noticed him; he kept his voice low to avoid frightening her.

“Hullo there.”

“Eh?” she asked, turning her head backwards to view him, upside down. She grinned when she pieced together who it was; then she set the ukulele down beside her and rolled over onto her stomach. “Oh hi there, Mr. McCartney.”

Pushing herself up to sit, she reached over to a clear bottle—the captain’s homemade _raki_ , anise-flavoured and too strong for Paul’s taste, though he’d never admit it—and uncorked it to take a swig. The bottle was half empty.

“You went for a swim?”

“Aye,” she said. “With George and John and Pattie.” 

Paul could hear the alcohol licking the edges of her words and wondered if she’d been the one to deplete the alcoholic resources. _Swimming while drunk… terribly stupid_ , he wanted to say, but wisely chose not to. Instead, he stepped up onto the raised foredeck and stretched out beside her, moving the bottle to sit against the raised edge of the maintenance hatch, out of her reach. 

“You been out here long?” he asked.

“A few hours,” she said, gazing out at the ocean as she drew her knees up to her chest to stave off the chill that suddenly crept into her skin. “Where were you?”

“Here and there,” he said, clearing his throat. “Keeping Cyn and Jane company, working on a song—” 

“Did you see George?”

He swallowed, the terseness in Julia’s voice giving him pause. _Is she jealous?_ he wondered, and then: _Jealous of Jane? Or of Cynthia?_

“He forgot his funny little guitar… I don’t remember what it’s called…”

He reached for the instrument. “It’s a ukulele, love,” he said, giving it a quiet strum with his left thumb. “He’s teaching you how to play is he?” 

“I’m not very good,” she said, wrinkling her nose and reaching for the bottle behind Paul, successfully taking it from its ledge. “I’m not very good at a lot of things.”

“You are.”

She uncorked the bottle again and brought it to her lips. “Nah,” she said.

“Yer photos—”

She looked down as she set the bottle on the deck and her eyes landed on one of her cameras. She lifted it to eye level. “Oh I suppose,” she said, as if it were the first time she’d considered it. Her posture changed then. She sat up a little straighter, held her camera a little more delicately. “I suppose I am good at that.”

“More than good.”

“Practice,” she winked at him. “Lots of practice.” Julia sighed then, lowering her camera and letting her gaze fall somewhere off in the distance. “My photos… my camera… they were about the only thing I ever truly loved, you know,” she looked at him, leaned over and nudged him with her should. “Aside from you.”

Paul didn’t say a word, didn’t move a muscle; he wanted to let her speak, to see where it took her.

“I think… you know what I think? I think it’s because it’s _my_ world, what I see in the camera. It’s all mine. I control the whole scene… I’m in control…”

She paused, letting the word— _control_ —fill the air between them, giving it new meaning because of the generous space she allowed around it. _Control_ . That wasn’t something that Paul had ever thought about, but which suddenly made so much sense. What were those rules all those years ago if not an attempt at maintaining _control_? 

_Was that all this was? Was that all you wanted?_

Knowing what he knew, or what he thought he knew, he couldn’t fault her. Not one bit. 

She held the cameras in her hands, reverently, as though they were holy relics, and as she set them back down on the boat deck, she sighed. Paul returned the gesture of a few moments earlier, leaning over to her and nudging her with his shoulder.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

“You okay?” he asked.

She shrugged, her eyelids blinking slowly, heavily. “It’s been almost a week since I got any decent fuckin’ sleep,” she said, counting on her fingers. “I don’t think I’ve slept more than a few hours a day since we got here.” Julia was contemplative for a long moment before pushed herself up and crossed her legs in front of her. “This _raki_ is pretty good. Moonshine. No, better ‘n moonshine. I had some _real_ moonshine once, from Kentucky or somethin’. Tasted like battery acid.”

“You know what battery acid tastes like?”

She grinned. “No,” she said, making a face. “It’s just what people say, isn’t it?” She waved a hand in front of her face. “Anyroad, it does the trick, most of the time.”

“Puts you to sleep?”

“Aye.”

“Not very restful, I suppose.”

“But at least my eyes are closed.”

Paul leaned back on his elbows now. “You _have_ other options,” he said.

Julia looked at him and smirked. “What, you’ll put me to bed?”

He shrugged; it was an odd way of phrasing it, and his mind began to wander. He knew she was drunk, had said it with homemade grape stem alcohol drowning her words, but that didn’t stop him from going there. 

“If you asked me to,” he murmured.

He felt her shiver and sigh, and he leaned up a bit to shrug off his shirt—thin, short-sleeved, but he hoped it might help cut the chill she was clearly experiencing—and placed it over her shoulders.

“Ta,” she said, and then there was another pause, longer this time, as Julia continued to chew on her words. Finally, she took a breath. “John and me, we haven’t been good.”

Paul swallowed. “No?” he asked, his tongue thick in his mouth.

She shook her head and stared straight ahead, drawing her knees up to tuck them under her chin. “I asked him to run away with me the other night. He said no.” She paused. “Well, he didn’t say anything, so I took it to mean no…”

 _I asked him to run away with me_. Paul didn’t want to hear this but he tried not to sound disappointed. “I thought we were going to try friends first.”

“Is that what you still want?” she asked.

He shrugged. “If it’s what you want.”

“ _N’importe quoi_ ,” she whispered, looking out over the ocean. “You know me mum drowned, eh?”

Paul nodded. “You told us that a few nights ago.”

Julia nodded and pushed herself up, the physical act of distancing herself from him mimicking the faraway feel of the words she spoke, the disconnect that existed between reality as he knew it and the reality that Julia so often slipped into. 

“Killed herself, she did. Me grandmother too,” she continued. “When Mum was just a wee slip of a girl.” Julia was peering over the edge of the boat, her eyes soft, hazy and unfocused. “You know how, in some families, there’s musical talent running through them, and in others it’s blue eyes?” she asked. “In my family, it’s this. Sickness. Insanity.”

Paul didn’t like the sound of this. “Why don’t we get you to bed, Jules?”

But she wasn’t really listening to him, speaking instead just to speak, to get it off her chest. “ _Laisse tomber_ …” she drawled, looking down over the edge of the boat to the water below. “You know, I’ve been studyin’ the teachings of this guru… The Maharishi, ‘e’s called. Little guy. Bit weird lookin’. But ‘e’s got a lot to say about life and the material world and the little concerns we bother with day-to-day.”

Paul nodded, not following her train of thought. Julia simply pressed the bottle of _raki_ to her lips again and took another long pull from the bottle.

“‘E says—the Maharishi, this guru—’e tells us that our thoughts are… are like bubbles… I think… an’ in order to _experience_ them we have to _transcend_ them…,” she realised she wasn’t making any sense, and with a deep furrow of her brow she shook her head and changed gears. “I don’t get it, really, but I’m learnin’. I never actually _met_ the guy, just listened to him lecture once,” she said. “‘E’s a strange little man. But when I get my mantra and can start meditating…”

Julia trailed off, lost in her own thoughts, and Paul went with her, following her lead hand over hand, free associating as they drifted on the open sea. but he was drawn back to the present as Julia pitched herself up onto her knees and reached for the railing in front of her. Paul pushed himself up to the side as she did so.  

“You gonna lose it?” Paul asked as he joined her at the edge, hoping she wouldn’t puke anywhere except in the water.

“Nah,” she said. “I’m admiring the view.”

Paul smiled and joined her, looking down at the hull of the boat where it joined with the gently lapping waters.

“It’s a clipper bow,” she said, pointing one long finger down at the line of the ship.

“What’s that?”

“I dunno,” she admitted, resting back on her haunches again. “I heard someone say that and I thought it sounded nice. _Clipper bow_ ,” she smiled, rolling the word around in her mouth, the soft velar stop in the ‘c’ or the way her lips barely came together on the double ‘p’ in clipper; the fully round shape of her lips and tongue as it bent around ‘bow’. Paul could watch her say it over and over again all night if she’d let him. 

“I like nautical talk,” she said finally.

Paul leaned back again and returned his eyes to the stars above. “I like nautical talk too,” he admitted. “It’s like a private club once you know the lingo.”

“Yeah,” she whispered. When he turned his attention back, he saw her staring back at the water still. “I think I’m gonna go to India next year.” 

“For this Maharishi fellow?”

Julia paused for a moment, still staring at the water. “I own the mews house, you know.” 

He hadn’t known that. It was a strange thing for her to say, a non-sequitur entirely apropos of nothing. Paul furrowed his brow. “You own it? You mean you bought it?”

“Sort of?” she said. “I mean, my name is on the title.” She paused. “We’re not livin’ there, me and Adam. I built a dark room. It’s a studio, I suppose. Adam stays there so he can work. Brian’s put us up in this posh hotel in the Strand so I stay there, and Adam has the house.” She shrugged, lifting a hand to scratch beneath her nose. “Just in case you were curious.”  
Nothing about this conversation seemed professional, or friendly. The subtext glowed like neon. He felt acutely uncomfortable—with the drinking, with the looseness of her words, with the implications being hinted at, about John and Adam and her hotel room in the Strand. 

“Why would I need to know that, Julia?”

He hadn’t meant for it to sound cruel but the shadow that crossed her face made him wonder if she’d taken it that way.

“Do you remember that movie? The one with Jimmy Stewart? At Christmas time?”

Paul shook his head.

“You know!” she swatted his arm. “The one with the angel? Where he learns what the world would be like if he’d never existed?”

He grinned. “Yeah, sort of. Why?”

Julia turned back to the water, swinging her legs out so they dangled through the railing over the water. “Sometimes I wonder that myself. What would the world be like without me.”

Paul shook his head. “I wish you wouldn’t talk like that.”

She ignored him. “What’s down there, d’you reckon?” she asked. 

He looked down into the water. Something about the darkness of the depths, the untold mysteries that lay obscured and hidden away however many fathoms below. Shipwrecks. Treasures. Sea monsters. Paul shivered. “Dunno.”

“Mermaids maybe,” Julia continued, her voice a dreamy half-pitch above a whisper. “Do you think I could be a mermaid, Paul?”

“Why do you want to be a mermaid?”

She shook her head, ignoring his question, pulling her legs back so she was kneeling now, pushing against the railing. Off in the distance, not too far away, a larger yacht passed by. Julia looked up as it rolled by, nearly silent. “People would be better off, I think, if I just wasn’t here to fuck things up.”

The already dark conversation had taken an even darker turn as it circled back and around, always, to her original point; Paul sought a way to steer it back to brighter ground. “Come on, Julia. Let’s not get maudlin…”

But she was ignoring him. “I could probably drop off the edge of this boat… sink like a stone in the crystal clear waters of the Aegean… and I doubt anyone’d miss me.”

Paul inched closer to Julia, within arms’ reach should she decide to test her theory. “Julia, you’re talkin’ nonsense. Will you come back and sit next to me?”

“I mean, take you for instance. If I hadn’t traipsed into your life… gotten in between you and John… where d’ye think you’d be right now?” She shook her head, having seemingly answered the question in her own mind, and Paul could plainly see how sad she was with the result. She was drunk and sleep-deprived, and the combination frightened him greatly.

“C’mon, Julia,” he whispered. “Just the other day you were the one who said you wouldn’t change a thing because it led us all together, and how nice that was…”

She didn’t seem to hear him. “If I could just have my own angel to show me… then I’d know what to do,” she whispered to herself.

The way she swayed, her torso resting against the flimsy rope, arms just hanging and moving with the ebb and flow of the ocean, made Paul exceedingly nervous. She leaned over a bit farther, as though she were trying to touch the water. He saw with crystal clarity the pale line of her arm lit up in the moonlight as it stretched down, down, down toward the cool blue waters just beyond her reach. His nervousness was coming up to the limit of his tolerance. She rocked with the movement of the boat, up and down; the tips of her fingers always seemed to be close enough to feel the air cool against its surface but too far away to break it. It was frustrating, and mesmerizing; he wanted her to achieve her goal (if only so that she’d come back over the railing) but a part of him realised that the rhythm of her movements had him so totally entranced that he could watch her all night.

In an instant, Julia lifted one knee from the deck and tried to give herself the few inches she thought she needed to touch the water. But she misjudged the distance, and with the wake of that larger vessel finally hitting the bow of their yacht, they rocked along on the waves. He experienced it in slow motion—seeing her bare skin breaking from the deck planks; the starboard roll that nearly knocked him off his feet; the startled yelp that came from her throat as she pitched forward towards the open sea. Paul pulled at her top, hoping the material would hold, and Julia wrung her hands around the rail and tried to pull herself back, until Paul finally secured a grasp around her arm; hooking his own arms under hers, he lifted her away from the edge. 

She fell back against him, her arms wrapped around herself as she wept.

“Jesus Christ, Julia!”

She shivered, and Paul forgot his anger as she folded into him and he circled his arms around her and they both dropped to the deck.

Julia didn’t say a word; she just sat and rocked next to him, shoulders shaking from the cold and adrenaline long after her tears had run their course. His shirt, long discarded from her shoulders, found its way back; he tucked it in where he could.

“Better?”

She nodded. “I could sleep for a thousand years, Paul, but I just can’t close my eyes.”

He rested his hand on her arm, stroking her skin with the barest graze of his fingertips. “I wish I could help.”

“You could…”

“How?” he asked. _Ask me anything, Julia. Ask me anything and if I can give it to you, it’s yours. Just say it, Julia…_

But she didn’t say it. Instead, he felt Julia’s hands undoing the knot in the drawstring at the front of his trousers, her long, cold, drunken fingers inching down against his lower abdomen, beneath his briefs, searching for him. The shock of the cold sensation as her hand encircled him left Paul reeling; but it was nothing compared to the moment she pushed the waistband aside complete and bent her head, freeing him from the restraints of his clothes and wrapping her lips around him in one swift movement.

“Julia—” he whispered, his breath ragged. “Christ almighty…”

He wasn’t coming up hard as she began, but it didn’t take long before he felt himself engorge and fill the space between her lips. While his rational mind chided him for his body’s willingness to participate, the lustful, carnal side of him couldn’t help it. She pulled up on him, all soft lips and wet tongue with the tiniest touch of teeth, just enough to drive him absolutely mad. He couldn’t help himself: he watched as she took him in completely, and he resisted the urge to thrust his hips as she pulled back, eyes half-lidded as she seduced her way back down again, her lips at the base of him. His cheeks flushed as she continued the languid push-and-pull, the warmth of her mouth and the cool air combining with the thrill of potentially being caught to push Paul closer and closer to an abyss he wasn’t sure he was ready to surrender to just yet. 

But her pace quickened, and he was reeling. He knew it wouldn’t be long before he finished. He had to stop her.

“No, Julia,” he hissed, gently trying to push her away.

Julia slowly raised her head, releasing him from her torturous grasp; she wiped her hand across her lips, discreetly as she could, and for a moment he sat there, stunned. 

“Julia, fuck—” he cried under his breath. “What d’ye think yer doin’?”

“I would have thought it was obvious,” she giggled, gripping the bottle again and taking a long pull from the opening. “Didn’t you like it?”

 _What do you fucking think?_ he wanted to say. But he didn’t. Instead he took the bottle from her hand, reeled back, and tossed it overboard.

“Hey!” she cried, watching at the bottle sailed through the air and landed, far off the starboard bow, with an unseen splash. She turned back to him then, accusatory. “What the fuck, Paul?”

“Stop it, Julia,” he said. “Stop drinking. Stop larkin’ about. What is going on?”

In the days leading up to this, she’d lectured him about her newest set of ground rules for their relationship, about friendship first and turning a new laaf; the preceding moment had obliterated them. While he tried to figure out what the hell had just happened, Julia’s face morphed until it was bisected by a wide, mirthless smile. It soon became the saddest look he’d ever seen before, on anyone’s face. Paul suddenly realised it wasn’t worth the fight. Drunk and bewildered, she would probably forget the entire thing by morning; it wouldn’t do any good to hash it out now.

“You’re cross with me.”

He shook his head. “I’m _worried_ about you,” he said, and he was; more worried than he’d been in a very long time. “There’s a difference.”

Tears sprang to her eyes. “I just wanted you to want me.”

Confused, Paul gaped at her. “So what? That was… _a downpayment?_ ”

Julia let her head fall to her hands and it hit him, hard, that _of course that’s what it was… that’s what it’s always been, hasn’t it?_

A transaction.

Why it hadn’t occurred to him earlier—years earlier, in the mews house, turned upside down and inside out by Hurricane Julia and he and John standing in the middle and coming to the realization that he’d been inching towards all those years: that Julia had been prostituting herself _to him_ in exchange for whatever it was she got from him—and why it had to be _now_ and _here,_ of all places, Paul wasn’t sure he’d ever know. But in that moment, and not just because he was filled up with unwanted and ruddy afterglow, he didn’t care about anything else except making Julia—the girl from Speke, the one with horror written into the past chapters of her story, the one right now self-medicating with homemade liquor and blowjobs on the deck of a boat beneath Cassiopeia—achieve stillness. 

It was darker now, harder to see as clouds covered the moon; the long periods of quiet were growing more plentiful than the words, and Paul wondered what it meant that he was okay with never speaking another word, so long as Julia remained softly and sweetly still against him. 

“D’you remember,” she whispered. “Back in Liverpool, when you used to come ‘round to my place and pick me up and we’d go for walks?”

As she spoke the words, the memories—hazy at best—returned to Paul. He nodded, even though until that moment, he hadn’t remembered them at all. “Yeah, actually. I’d forgotten…” 

Julia scooted over and lay down, resting her head in his lap. As she settled, she began to recite, trancelike, old lines from a half-remembered story Paul could only assume belonged within the pages of Joyce’s _Dubliners_. Her lips near his ear, he heard the words but they had no meaning. 

“ _Gazing up into the darkness... a creature driven and derided by vanity... my eyes burned with anguish and anger. L'angoisse et la colère... mes yeux brûlaient. My eyes burned…my eyes burned…_ ” she murmured.

His hand found her hair. He stroked it, damp waves leaving cold patches on his linen pants. It didn’t matter. He felt at peace, at home, in a way he hadn’t felt in years. A wave of protectiveness surged through him as he listened to her breathing, watching as her eyes closed, slowly to blink at first but then staying closed after a time.

 _Maybe she’ll sleep now,_ he wondered. He’d accept that, along with all the questions come sunrise, when they’d be found laying here, limb-tangled and drowsy; he wouldn’t even care if it was Jane who caught him. To give Julia the thing she needed—permission to rest, safely, in his care—he didn’t even care.  

Adam was the one who found them, no more than a few minutes later. Wild-eyed and panicked, he came bolting around the side of the cabin. “Jesus, I’ve been lookin’—”

Paul lifted a finger to his lips and pointed down at Julia, fast asleep at his side.

Adam nodded and walked across the planks to join them, taking up space beside Julia, half-in front of Paul. “She hasn’t slept in days.”

“She told me.”

Adam’s sigh was heavy. He was bleary-eyed from the marijuana and his own lack of sleep; he’d been a keen addition to the party earlier that evening despite having little experience with drugs before. Now, clearly, the effects had worn off; worry etched itself unnaturally into the face of a man far too young to have so much of it.

“She’s really out of it, huh.”

Paul shrugged. “I don’t know. She got into the captain’s _raki_ so I suppose that’s to blame, eh?”

He hoped his faked frivolity would be convincing, but his hopes were dashed when Adam looked up and met his eyes straight on.

“You don’t have to keep up a charade,,” Adam replied. “It’s how she copes. I know that. I know you know that. So let’s cut the bullshit.”

The straight-talking was a blessing, and Paul felt a load of tension release from his neck and shoulders as he blew out a breath and continued to stroke Julia’s hair. He remembered all the times before when she’d done the same thing, drinking herself into a stupor before doing something ridiculous. _Like trying to jump off a boat_ , Paul internalized. _Or walking in front of cars on Mather Avenue..._  

“It started, as far as I know, after her stepdad… well, you know.”

Adam nodded. “I lock away the alcohol at home. Bit harder with the needles, but I think we’re working on a solution there,” Adam ran a hand through his own hair. “I know she’s got issues. Her stepdad, you guys—” he flicked his eyes at Paul: “No offense.”

Paul immediately bristled at the notion that this man—someone he barely knew, whom Julia could only barely know herself—knew as much if not more than he did about her past. But he also realised that he’d found an ally; Adam’s concern for Julia was more than cursory. And Paul didn’t feel threatened by it. As hard as it was for Paul to admit, it was nice to have someone else in the know.

Adam continued. “She’s trying real hard to work through it. But it’s hard.”

“I know.”

“I keep thinking…,” Adam continued. “I’m glad you found her tonight, up there.” He swallowed. “For what it’s worth, she always said that no one and nothing made her feel better than you lot.”

“Yeah, well,” Paul started, without knowing where to continue. He wasn’t good at the heavy stuff and suddenly wished John was there with a quip to knock things back again. “Fat lot of good it did her, bein’ around us.”

“You were together then? The two of you?”

Paul startled at the question, wondering if it was meant euphemistically and almost nodding in answer to that question— _Yes, just now, she was giving me a blow job before you caught us_ —but he paused and sober second-reflection kicked in. Still, he nodded. “Yeah, on-and-off,” he said, looking down at Julia. “I was going with another girl at first, but I was besotted by Julia. She was so… _different_ , you know?”

Adam nodded but said nothing.

“We tried being exclusive but it was only after what happened to her…” Paul still couldn’t bring himself to say it, what her stepdad had done to her; part of him was still not even entirely sure what exactly had happened. But Adam knew, and Paul was grateful for not having to expand. “Anyway, it was never going to work at that point. I was too young, too stupid, and she… well, and then John was falling in love with her, too.”

Adam laughed. “Lucky girl.”

 _Hardly,_  Paul thought. “The way we carried on… beat each other senseless for the privilege of having her, we did. And then later, when we crossed paths in London… everyone carrying on in secret behind everyone else’s backs.” Paul’s guilty conscience caused his heart to ache. “It wasn’t fair. No wonder she left.”

Adam looked up at Paul, as if about to say something, but the words never came. 

“What?” Paul asked.

“Nothing,” Adam said as he looked away. “It wouldn’t be my place, anyway.”

Of all the times for Adam to hold back on a subject, now was the worst possible one. Paul looked down at Julia, the woman he thought he’d finally got figured out, and imagined how many more secrets she was still carrying within her. What would it take to get her to open up to him?

A breeze began to blow, and the clouds that had covered the moon began to darken, thicken; a storm was coming.

“Should get below decks,” Adam said.

“Right,” Paul muttered, looking down at Julia. “How should we—?”

Adam was already on it, kneeling at Julia’s side, slipping one arm beneath her knees and the other underneath her shoulders. 

“I can—”

“It’s all right,” Adam said. “She’s not your responsibility anymore.”

There was a good chance Adam meant it as he’d said it and not as a slight against him, but as he watched Adam lift Julia as if she weighed nothing and carry her back down the port side of the ship, Paul couldn’t help but feel as if the American had said something revealing in that moment. 

Paul shivered, and realized that Julia was still wearing his overshirt. he’d get it in the morning, he thought, as another stiff breeze whipped over the deck, and Paul stood up on shaky legs to discover that his drawstring was still undone, his trousers still sitting a little too low on his hips. If Adam had seen, could add two and two together, Paul didn’t want to think about what the younger man thought of him right then.

Demoralized, scandalized, and feeling more than a bit sorry for himself, Paul picked up after Julia, taking the ukulele in hand and slinging the two cameras around his neck as he began the long walk back to his bunk, feeling more exhausted than he remembered feeling in a very long time.

As he rounded the corner and into the shadow of the cabin, he bumped into Jane. She gave a quiet  _meep_ of surprise and shrank back from Paul as he reached out his hand, the one with the ukulele, towards her.

“I heard a noise—” she started, but even in the dark the brilliant paleness of her face gave it away, and Paul knew without needing to be told that she had heard everything...

“Jane—”

“Don’t, Paul,” she said, tears in her eyes and her throat as her features hardened. “Don’t you fucking touch me.”

She turned and walked away, and Paul lost sight of her as she disappeared around the corner to descend the steps into the bowels of the yacht once again.

* * *

PAUL: I mean, the trip was a bust anyway. We never bought the island, lost interest as soon as we got back to England, essentially. But what happened that night…

MURPHY: Did it ruin the rest of your trip?

PAUL: No. No the trip—we compartmentalized that. That’s the thing. They say sunlight is the best disinfectant but it shocked me how forgotten the whole thing felt by the light of day. Everything was just put in a box and left on a shelf by everyone, and we did and said nothing until… well, later that summer… ( _Long pause_ ) What I meant was, you know, Greece might have been the last time any of us were on the same wavelength like that. Things changed so quickly afterwards… not just for The Beatles but for all of us, individually and together. That precarious balance… it wouldn't last. It just  _couldn't…_


End file.
